


Desert of Providence

by BetweenTownleys, squidnapped



Category: Grand Theft Auto V
Genre: F/M, M/M, RPG log, trailer husbands timeline
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-06
Updated: 2014-10-10
Packaged: 2018-02-16 09:36:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 39,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2264763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BetweenTownleys/pseuds/BetweenTownleys, https://archiveofourown.org/users/squidnapped/pseuds/squidnapped
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every relationship has rules. When forced to live in close proximity, Michael and Trevor develop a nasty habit of of breaking all of theirs. </p><p> (Set after Caida Libre with trailer Mrs. Madrazo. Joint work between SQUIDNAPPED (michael) and BETWEENTOWNLEYS (Trevor).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> Part 1 of the continuing RPG logs between SQUIDNAPPED (who writes Michael) and BETWEENTOWNLEYS (who writes Trevor). Please be warned that the content of this thread at times can get pretty gross. If things like eating people, describing a pussy, terrible body smells, gutting living things, ripping ears off, prostitution galore, shotgun headshots, inappropriate bowel movements, belly worshiping, fucking corpses, or eating ice cream bother you, then... actually... I'm not super sure why you're reading a trikey fanfiction to begin with??

Some days were good days. When Trevor awoke with a startled snort flat on his back, he wasn't entirely sure this was going to be one of them.

For long moments, the sunburnt Canadian laid in perfect stillness under the clear noon sky, savoring the acrid, burnt chemical flavor on the back of his palette. Never a good start. But, for once, Trevor hadn't regained consciousness again with his mother's name falling off his wretched tongue. So that was something. AND, with a bleary glance to either side of himself, he also appeared to be alone. No corpses to cool his bed this time. No unfamiliar dead eyes staring infinitely past him in morbid reproach. No blood.

Trevor lifted a grimy hand to his face, and it came away wet.

Ok. Blood. Yes.

The distinct pinch of naked flesh on hot tin propelled him forward, and with a long, drawn-out groan he dragged himself up into a sitting position. The world tilted sideways, then begrudgingly settled again in a nauseous teeter totter. He felt like a dried husk.

Trevor was sitting on the roof of his trailer in a bloody dress. He calculated a line of probable scenarios, and after coming up mostly blank decided the odds in this particular situation had tipped in his favor. He was at his fucking place of residence, for starters. NOT 15 miles deep up the side of some fucking mountain in his underwear, or in a barn full of cows and angry women screaming at him in slurred spanish. OR waking up with his arm and leg flung out over the ledge of a skyrise. The memory brought a jolt of pain on, somewhere in the vicinity of his taint. Heights had never been a problem for Trevor, but there were heights in a plane, and there were heights when your morning wood was hanging off a 35 story ledge.

"mmmnnnNN —RON!" The pilot bellowed, as he simultaneously rubbed a hand across his splattered face like a sleepy child does before a crash. "…RONALD!"

In the distance Ron's trailer door banged open. The pitter patter of flip-flops on gravel rounded up to the porch, but stopped with some confusion at the stairs.

"Trevor? Trevor, where are you?"

"I'm up here, you obtuse dingleberry."

Ron skittered back as Trevor leaned forward and they made eye contact at a perfect right angle. "T-Trevor? What are you _doing_ up there?"

The man who Trevor considered a permanent unpaid employee stared up at him with a cup of coffee already in his hand, slackjaw in the burning sun. He wore a tropical button-down, and immediately, like a hammer crashing irrefutably down, Trevor Philips recalled the existence of Michael Townley.

"Where the _hell_ did you get that gaudy piece of shit, Ronald? You look like an 80s montage."

The man looked down at himself, confused, then back up again. "What? This?" He jabbed the shirt. "Mr. De Santa gave it to me!"

"Michael. His name is Michael, NOT 'Mr. De Santa'." Trevor finger quoted the name, his tone dripping with mocking venom. "His fucking name isn't even De Santa! And you sound like a simpering asshole when you call him that, so don't."

To that, Ron had no reply. Instead he waited patiently on the sidelines as Trevor bodily hauled himself over the edge of the roof, and shimmied his way down, ass first. He wasn't wearing any underwear for potentially a number of reasons, but either way it serviced Ron getting more than his fair share of an eyeful before the pilot's work boots landed solidly again on the dry ground. He dutifully handed Trevor the mug in his hand.

Trevor took the coffee and gulped it down, rivulets of liquid dribbling down the sides of his face and soaking into the silky bust of the green floral dress he sported. Half the cup was emptied before he came up for air again with a loud belch. "And…where is good old Mikey?"

Recently, things had never been better from Trevor's perspective. From the moment he had gently placed the beautiful Patricia Medrazo into the trunk of her husband's car, he knew his plan had been a solid one. Patricia, Michael, Ronald, Wade? All of them, together. One big, happy family at last! He'd said as much in his letter to Jimmy, telling him to abandon all hope of ever regaining his father. The feeling was a reverent one, thinking of Michael and his perfect family as if admiring a crystal figure in a glass case, resplendent and delicate. He pushed the mug back into Ron's chest, pivoted on one foot, and vomited blood into the dirt.

"WOAH— holy—? Trevor, are you alright?"

Trevor wiped the bloody bile away with the back of his arm, stooping over somewhat as the pain subsided. Huffing gas ALWAYS fucked with his system. In a bad way. Always.

"Eugh, I asked you a fucking question, Ron…"

Ron stepped back hesitantly, concern clear on his twitchy face. "Michael? He took Patricia to get an ice cream about 20 minutes ago. You were gone."

"HER, you call ' _Mrs. Madrazo'_. Have some god damn _respect_ , Ronald." Grumbling, the Canadian waved Ron off and turned to lumber into his trailer.

It was hot inside. Maybe hotter than outside, which was really saying something, considering Trevor had just woken up frying like an egg literally on a hot tin roof. He pulled the mysteriously bloody dress off of his sweating body and threw it on the floor of his bedroom, instantly forgetting all the questions it's presence raised. The bed was there, though it was littered with mounds of dirty clothing. And pizza boxes. And…ALSO blood stains. Though unlike the dress on the floor, these particular stains were all Trevor Philips originals.

Naked and exhausted, Trevor collapsed face-first down into the mildewing mattress. He hated sleeping as a general rule, but something told him his allotted 12 hours were long overdue. Passing out and sleeping, after all, were definitely not the same thing, especially taking into account Ron's testament of his absence from the vicinity 20 minutes ago. His eyes fluttered shut, thoughts of Michael Townley's broad shoulders drifting with him in and out of consciousness.

  
*  


Michael was perfectly aware that taking a morning stroll in the company of someone he was believed to have recently kidnapped was maybe not the brightest idea. But then again, Michael seemed a little low on bright ideas lately. And he had to do something to get out of that place.

Upon waking up that morning, his not insubstantial weight sunk deep into the broken springs on that godforsaken couch, his head heavy with the familiar feeling of hangover, desert light was streaming through dirty windows directly into his _fucking eyeballs_ to pierce the back of his brain like a butcher knife. He'd had to finish a bottle and a half of Maclain's just to get to sleep, his ears plagued with the animal sounds of Trevor doing _something in the night_ before crawling up onto the roof like a B-movie horror trope. Now, at whatever o'clock in the morning, he was blessedly silent.

To escape the bright light of morning (seriously how did that much light get in through those windows? By Michael's estimate their insides were coated with enough methadone and biological matterto give FIB forensics a raging hard on) Michael had flipped himself over and buried his face into the couch's deepest, darkest crevice. Which was, in hindsight, a terrible fucking mistake. He breathed in for a deep sigh and was immediately assaulted with more smells than he had thought possible from a single patch of fabric. Piss, sure. Blood, definitely. Meth smoke, cigarette smoke, alcohol, check check check. And then, beneath, something else—an amalgamation of all of the above plus layers of dead skin, dried sweat, spit, cum, heat, loneliness, desperation. _Trevor._

Something old and dangerous shifted within him, like a leviathan rolling over in its sleep. Michael's dick actually _twitched_ in his boxers, and with a strangled cry he propelled himself backwards and landed on the trailer floor with a thud. Empty cans skittered across the floor, and Patricia Madrazo's pink form appeared in the doorway of Trevor's bedroom.

"Mr. De Santa, are you alright?"

Michael twisted onto his side and curled his legs up in an attempt to hide his ( _TRAITOROUS_ )half woody. He twisted his neck around to squint at her and attempt a smile.

"Oh yes, Mrs. Madrazo, sorry to wake you. I just, uh, woke up from a bad dream."

_I fucking wish._

_"_ Oh," she said, looking slightly worried.

Michael heaved himself up into a sitting position and stuffed his hands into his lap. He gave an exaggerated yawn.

"What do you say we get out of here for a bit, maybe get some ice cream?"

"Oh... alright," she said, sounding a little confused. He wondered, not for the first time, if Trevor was drugging her somehow. She was remarkably calm for having been abducted from her house by a Canadian serial killer.

"Just give me a second to get changed."

He threw on some random clothes he'd bought from Binco yesterday and they headed out together into the morning air. The schizophrenic next door was already up and about in the yard, inexplicably rifling through the bushes. Michael definitely did not want to know.

"Hey, we're going out for some ice cream," he called in a voice that was probably a little louder than necessary, carried a little farther for ears that may be nearby.

The man looked up at him, giving off a deer-in-headlights vibe. He was wearing a tropical shirt that almost matched Michael's own, and suddenly Michael was struck with a hazy memory of pushing it into Ron's hands last night in a strange drunken moment of trying to buy good will. The little guy hated him, he was pretty sure, though he wasn't sure what he'd done to deserve it (for once). So when Michael got into his second bottle of Maclain's and the thought of one more person despising him became too much to handle, he had tried to buy his forgiveness with a hawaiian shirt. _Typical fucking Townley._

Still the man said nothing, but Michael considered his message delivered. As they left the trailer park, Michael resolutely did not look up on the roof.

So now here they were, perched awkwardly on a picnic table beside the only gas station Michael could find that sold soft serve at 11am.

As Mrs. Madrazo sat dutifully licking her double scoop, Michael just stared miserably into space as his chocolate soft serve began coating his hands with a sticky mess. His mind was stuck on that couch, his olfactory sense alive with memory and self-loathing and the faint stirrings of old desire. Memories he hadn't revisited in years—barely lit alleyways, motel rooms, the backs of cars—were attempting to claw their way into his conscious brain. Sort of like when he was a little kid in swim class, and he got in trouble for holding other boys' heads under the water. They were fighting and clawing to come up for air. Of course, what he had never told _anybody_ was that the reason he was holding them down was less out of contempt and more out of a deep fear of drowning, to help keep his _own_ head out of the water.

When he snapped out of it and saw that his ice cream cone was just a cup of brown liquid, he threw the whole thing to the ground in disgust.

"Fuck this!" he shouted hoarsely, jumping to his feet. He wanted to punch someone and/or puke. Fuck his life, fuck ice cream, fuck his kids and his wife, fuck the FIB, fuck Martin Madrazo, FUCK Trevor FUCKING Philips.

Remembering himself, he looked apologetically to Mrs. Madrazo. God, what was wrong with him? He was so on edge lately, in his own head, moody and prone to outbursts.

She didn't say anything, just smiled a little smile.

"What do you say we get some actual breakfast?" he said, looking at her a little shyly over his $5 sunglasses. "Pancakes, bacon, _huevos_ , whatever you want, it's on me."

She continued to smile, quietly handed him a napkin for his dripping fingers.

"And then, maybe, I don't know..." he continued, wiping the sugary mess from each digit. "How would you feel about helping me clean a couch?"

  
*  


The dreams were always dark. They lived in the recesses, in the terrifying places the little girl under the stairs was always too afraid to face. She hid in the crevices, in the in-between spots behind open doors, under sagging mattresses, behind rows of musty winter coats, her back pressed hard up against the cheap drywall of the back of the closet. They always found her.

Ryan was there, belt in hand. He was a dark silhouette against the burning white light from the kitchen. He walked as if possessed, a captive lion on the other side of a tall fence. The smell of blood and feces and cracked leather permeated that dark, and Trisha shook with a fear too deep and too old to recollect it's origin. The belt cracked, and the dark place filled up with pools of orange.

Michael laughed from inside a swath of scarf as he sat on the hood of his Camaro, a cigarette dangling thoughtlessly from the tacky skin of his lower lip. Snow settled on his shoulders and in his hair in fat clumps, like so many moths, became handfuls of white wings that fanned themselves in the off-white afternoon light. Blood was on his face, then there was an empty field, and Trevor was down on his hands and knees in the ice, panting searing gulps of air into winded lungs. He had to go back. Michael was back there, he was alone, they were _coming for him_ , he needed _help_... He was dead in the water, dead on the snowy ground clutching a bullet hole beneath his ribcage as oil and rotten tar poured out from between his fingers in an endless torrent.

She was sliding her hand up his thigh. Her nails were sharp talons, blood red to set off the nauseous orange tint her already naturally red hair required to hide the gray streaks which kissed her temples in skeletal fingers. Sharp, sensual tracks ran across the growing bulge in his pants, and Ryan was there again, and his father, and the dogs he'd killed when he was fifteen and curious just to see what would happen. Their stench was horrendous. It was overwhelming, forcing the bile up and out of Trevor's nose and mouth in a violent gush. He was vomiting next to Michael. They were 20 and Trevor clutched the flare gun in his pocket like it was a lifeline. He could still smell the brains and the sulfur mingling, a cloying sweet composition of horrified memories. She touched his face, pulling him in close for a kiss.

_Her voice was slow and slippery. 'don't you want to make your mamma happy?'_

**"** _**MMMOTHER!** _ **"**

Trevor jerked awake with a violent full-body wrench.

He sat naked and panting in a pool of his own sweat for a few terrified moments, attempting to swallow with enough force to push his manically beating heart back down his esophagus. Down, down, down, and back into it's rightful cage in the center of his chest. His startled outburst clung to him with a cloying force, the nightmare fading slowly as he dragged long lungfuls of hot air in and out of his wretched body. His mother was NOT THERE. She wasn't there, this was his... his... HIS, mother, HIS OWN trailer. Not hers. NOT _hers_. She could be a ghost by now, for all Trevor knew. Certainly, her ghost hands still trailed him now. His bulging eyes swept down, and settled with shame and pain on his own half-invigorated hard on.

In a moment of profound loneliness, like a child longs to be comforted after falling down, the wrinkled Canadian's erratic mind quested desperately out for Michael Townley.

But that Michael was dead. The Michael he had loved so ferociously, that man was buried under 60 extra pounds of spite, self interest, and egotistical megalomania. It had been so much worse when Trevor had thought he had been buried under 6 feet of dirt, but it was strange now too, in a way. Strange to miss a man so bitterly he knew could stand right in front of him. He only knew one thing for sure. He wanted to keep him. To keep Michael De Santa, (and the flawless Patricia) trapped in his trailer for as long as possible. He desired it, more than he wanted anything else. It didn't make sense, but Trevor had made peace a long time ago with the knowledge that literally nothing about his life did.

In the other room, Trevor heard the faint hum of the radio playing. He focused on that for long moments as his breathing stabilized again. A glance at his phone told him he had been sleeping for an hour... a pathetic attempt at resting a body long since beyond hope. Now that he was awake again though, it seemed pointless to attempt to return to sleep. He stood with a rough grunt, for once ignoring the partially hard condition of his cock in favor of pulling on a pair of pink running shorts. He stalked out into his kitchen, one hand nervously smoothing out his mustache.

Michael and Patricia weren't back yet. That burned, oddly. Were they bonding? Were they having a _pleasant lunch_ together while poor Trevor was left to pace holes in his linoleum floor? Were they on a fucking _date_ or something? Something Michael failed to realize was that Patricia actually _gave a shit_ about him. She fed him, she cleaned his clothes. She WASHED him. (ok, maybe his chubby was acceptable again.) She SAW him for WHO HE WAS, which was more than he could say for that incorrigible, fat shadow that walked around and talked and looked and even _smelled_ like Michael Townley. And, God, did Michael smell. This weather, plus his chubby tits and stomach rolls? Whewie! And his balls...? The cloth of the pilot's pink shorts stirred disconcertingly as Trevor slammed a glass down on the counter and topped it off with the half-empty bottle of bourbon Michael had left capless on the counter.

Glass in hand, Trevor kicked open his trailer door and went to stalk back and forth in the yard. When Michael and Patricia returned, he wanted to be there to _welcome them home._

  
*  


Walking back to the trailer through the dusty noon air, Michael actually felt more normal than he'd felt in a long time. Once he and Mrs. Madrazo had gotten into a greasy spoon and some food in them (ice cream, what the fuck was he thinking? He must have still been a little drunk), the awkwardness had more or less broken and they'd had a pretty pleasant, if largely contentless, conversation. It had been a long time since Michael had just talked to someone—not trying to get an angle on them, or screaming at them, or getting screamed at, or getting analyzed. Hell, he hadn't even lied that much. Just told a few little white ones, when details were better glossed over, or just if he thought they'd make a better story. And he didn't want to get all "clairvoyant elder minority trope" about it, but he could have sworn that every time he didn't quite tell the truth she got that little smile on her face, like she knew he was full of shit but kind of liked him anyway. At least he hoped that was what that was about.

After breakfast they stopped in at a convenience store and bought out their cleaning supplies section—at least as much of it as they could carry with them—and walked back to the trailer in a silence much more companionable than before. That is, until Michael spotted a familiar form prowling the yard. Unsure just how much murder was in him, he slowed Mrs. Madrazo down with an outstretched arm.

"Well good morning, merry sunshine," he called out. "Sleep okay up there?"

  
*  


The sight of Michael De Santa's face brought on it's regular unsettling influx of conflicting emotions, paired now with the angxiety of too-recent nightmares. Michael greeted him with friendliness in the early afternoon sun, but the words were _funny_. Trevor doubled back on them, one finger already jabbed out accusatorily at his running partner from where his fist was wrapped around the bourbon.

"Up..." The finger swiveled to jab at his trailer. "...Up there?" The words were blank, Trevor's face equally devoid of any clue suggesting which way his mood might blow.

So. Michael _knew_ he had been on the roof. Actually, scratch that. Michael _knew_ that his BEST FRIEND was baking at 120 degrees on a hot tin roof under direct sun in the middle of the _desert_ while COVERED in a stranger's blood... and... Michael had then... done... nothing? A dark cloud passed over Trevor's face, and the scowl sent in Michael's direction was borderline murderous.

That was so _fucking typical_ of Michael to give literally no thought to anyone other than himself. It was annoying. Actually, glancing at Patricia, it was infuriating. And what were those, plastic bags? Had they _gone shopping_ together?

Like flipping a switch, Trevor set aside his anger at Michael. Part of the criminal was still snuffling around in his own head like a lost child in need of a firm hug, but an even larger part was experiencing a more complex amalgamation of fear and anger at his recent dreamy recollections of Michael's quote unquote _'death'_. It was confusing to the point of seeding the beginning of a headache. Did he want to _throttle Michael's corpse_ for first abandoning him and then stealing Patricia, or did he want to fall to his knees and grip as much of Michael as he could in prideless, tearful thanks? Neither, was the final conclusion after a long pause. Instead, leveling him with one more glare, he turned to offer an arm to Mrs. Madrazo.

"Well good morning to you, Mrs. M, and don't you look lovely today? Here, let me take those for you!" Trevor's spare hand looped out to take the cleaning supplies from Patricia and he turned his sunburnt back on them to storm back into the trailer.

He threw the bags thoughtlessly on the counter, and turned as the others were stepping through the threshold.

"So!" Trevor queried with the forced chipper tone of a sunday school teacher, while simultaneously resting his heavy palm on a bag of crystal. "What have my two favorite people been up to on this fine, _fine_ American morning? _Shopping_? Hmmm?"

  
*  


As Michael followed Trevor and Mrs. Madrazo back into the trailer, feelings of relief and unease were at war within him. Relief at the fact that Trevor's glance of _bloody murder_ had momentarily disappeared, though it could certainly reappear when/if he learned of Michael's plan to bleach every surface within his trailer while he beauty-slept. The unease was at the shift in his groin at seeing Trevor in those pink shorts (seriously, were those made for a 13 year old girl? They might as well have TAP THIS written on the ass in rhinestones). He took a moment to subtly readjust his crotch and attempt to _hate himself to death_ before crossing the threshold.

"We went out and had some ice cream, I told your neighbor to tell you," Michael said, and was curious at his own omission of Ron's name even as he did it. He felt a little grouchy about Ron for reasons he wasn't quite prepared to examine.

"Then we did a little shopping."

He set his bags of supplies on the counter beside the others, running in his head through possible ways to get around admitting he wanted to clean everything in the trailer only in lieu of burning it to the ground. He had picked out what he thought was an appropriate one when Patricia beat him to the punch.

"We got cleaning supplies, Trevor. If I'm going to be staying here a while I at least want to clean the place up. Starting with the couch."

  
*  


He didn't like that they had spent so much time together.

Trevor's bloodshot eyes bounced back and forth between Michael and Patricia, jealousy seeping into the corners of his thoughts. Another minute of listening proved too long to stand immobile in one place, and the pilot turned on a work boot to scour the room. He found his glass pipe by the box of Pisswasser sitting on the round table. Quickly, he loaded it with a pinch full of crumbly white rock, and lifted the implement to his mouth. The initial inhale made a world of difference, and his body broke out in a fine sheen of sweat as an electric buzz shot down his veins and ricocheted back up into his brain. He shook his head once, twice, then set the bowl down again, turning as he exhaled a cloud of acrid white smoke.

"A little shopping, eh? Well golly, it sounds like you two had _quite_ the morning! _"_

A morning full of what sounded _strangely..._ like _fun_. Like ice cream and giggling, and maybe picking out outfits for each other. The fantasy churned for a minute, as the man stared at his involuntary husband-and-wife tag team. _They didn't need him_ , the thought seemed to echo. They were fine on their own, enjoying a pleasant morning in each other's company. While Trevor boiled away, forgotten, unnoticed. Or something _worse_ than unnoticed, _ignored_. His scowl returned, this time thicker, heavier, and more potent with the push of methamphetamines, now throttling all his reactions forward at a much harder volume.

Like a considering tiger, Trevor slowly stalked over to his couch and sat down on it, spreading his legs and wrapping his naked arms along either side.

They wanted... to... clean? They wanted to clean his _couch_? ... _this_ couch?

Did they not understand how many dastardly deeds had taken place on this couch? It was irreparable, like Trevor himself. But at _least_ it had _character_. It had _integrity_. It was HONEST about it's flaws. It didn't try and HIDE things, or COVER PROBLEMS UP with quick fixes. No amount of money in the world could remove the kinds of stains which marred the flesh of this couch. Just leave it to arrogant, money-grubbing Michael to think he could fix things with a quick buck.

But, then again, _it was Patricia_ who had asked...

Like heat lightning, Trevor's gaze flicked between them, though at last settling on Michael instead of Mrs. Medrazo.

"Of COURSE, Mrs. M! What makes _you_ happy makes _me_ happy. Im reeeeeaaaally sorry I can't promise we won't have to chop you up into little bits and drink your guts in a margarita in front of your sack of shit husband, but, you know what? _Mi Casa, Su Casa_ , as they say!" his hand swept out in a broad and general welcoming gesture. A rat skittered across the floor.

...Maybe it was for the best. The only good thing that happened on this couch recently was Michael's penchant for sleeping on it with his ass hanging out. A dangerous and uncalculated move, by all accounts. Trevor's eyes hungrily swept Michael up and down.

  
*  


Michael grimaced at the sight and smell of Trevor's inhale—decidedly his least favorite of Trevor's habits ( _more than indiscriminate murder?_ a small voice attempted and was quickly put to rest by the weight of his own history, his own capability). He opted for stoic disapproval and disgust over petulant coughing, but only just.

By the time Trevor quit pacing and came to rest on the couch (though Michael knew _rest_ was a dangerously inaccurate term, and felt acutely aware of every molecule in Trevor's body buzzing, his apparent stillness some kind of quantum illusion designed to trick his prey into believing he wasn't _always about to strike_ ), Michael's own hackles were beginning to rise in response.

Since coming into such close sustained contact with Trevor in the past few days, something was happening in his body that greatly disrupted the inertia it had become accustomed to in the past nine years. If he was honest, it had actually started with Franklin's entrance into his life; ever since he'd snuck into the back of his son's car and gotten into a fist fight with an Armenian, apathy had been given over to feeling, inaction to action, depression to rage. And that rage was beginning to boil in his blood at Trevor's _casual fucking insanity_ , his insistence on being a fucking meth-head psychopath at every _possible fucking opportunity._ Michael had been having _such a nice day_ until his best friend had to go and remind them all of the precariousness of their situation, the fact that none of them, none of this was normal. That it was impossible to _Febreeze a fucking couch_ without a sweet old lady being _threatened with dismemberment._

All this while sitting spread-eagled on a couch with what Michael greatly feared was his _unwashed sack_ hanging out the side of one of his shorts legs. Michael forbid himself dipping his eyes below Trevor's, wouldn't (couldn't) allow Trevor the satisfaction of knowing his own curiosity. Especially not when Trevor was suddenly giving his body an ancient look that signaled he couldn't decide whether he wanted to fuck him or eat him. A look that Michael's body remembered from across bedrooms and bars, to which—lifetimes on—it _still wanted to respond_ , by fists or by fuck.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Madrazo began unpacking cleaning supplies in innocent determination, apparently oblivious to the tension sparking between their bodies. In her defense, Michael reasoned, she must have been used to some tense situations as a gangster's wife. He still couldn't imagine she had any kind of experience navigating a Trevor Philips (how could she? His Trevor was one of a kind. Wait fuck hold on), and after their morning pleasantries (that were becoming enigmatically and increasingly sacred to him) he was eager to prevent her imminent demise. This was _his_ grenade to step on, not hers, his body told him with a small helping of altruism and an unsettling measure of self-destructive glee.

After a few beats of glarey silence, Michael said with a calculated breath of sarcastic exhaustion to disguise any emotion, "Come on, T, let's get out of here, let Mrs. M do her thing. There have got to be some bars we can haunt or bikers we can murder without getting in her way."

He moved toward Trevor to ostensibly haul him off the couch while putting his body between Trevor's and Mrs. Madrazo's. His hope was that the carrot of distraction and quality bro time together would bump Trevor off whatever path they were currently hurtling down. Maybe there was a strip club nearby he could unleash Trevor's energy onto.

If this bomb was going to go off, he could at least do the hero thing and fly it out to sea before it detonated, saving a couple innocents in the process.

  
*  


Quality time. Trevor's carnivorous look gave a distinct twitch, something a little vulnerable flashing at the seemingly innocuous suggestion. It was replaced in a matter of nanoseconds by a showy yellow grin.

"Mikey, _at last_! Now you're talkin' my language, amigo!" He stood with perhaps a little _too_ much excitement. The idea of a Mikey and Trevor solo mission was apparently too tempting an offer to turn away. Strangest by far, Trevor's anger seemed to have been suddenly wiped clean. Meth or no, the dramatic shift in mood was palpable in his body language as he flung an arm roughly around Michael's neck. It was almost a choke-hold at first, but then grew softer as the Canadian drew him in close beneath his right armpit.

"I mean I won't _kill_ ya for suggesting such a dirty goddamn laundry list of inappropriate activities in front of the beautiful Patricia, _he's sorry, Patricia_ , but it's better than you sitting in my place of residence, sweating buckets and moping around all day like one of your fuckin kids!" Trevor's free hand gleefully gestured his dialogue, sweeping broad gestures between the tiny redhead and the constipated looking M. "Who actually needs air conditioning, Michael? I mean, really _needs it,_ in a hunter gatherer sense of the word? All it does is encourage fat fucking retirees to sit like petrified tree stumps in front of their flatscreens all day, it's an _unnatural_ _aberration_. Go outside! Look at a flower! Or a, uhh... a river! A... goddamn game of darts, you could look at a pussy... I don't care, _whatever_! It's more about THE ADVENTURE, Michael. _The pussy adventure_. You _used to_ know that. You used to be FUN!"

Under his arm, Michael's body was boiling hot, and smelled like what Trevor imagined heaven must be like (if such a fucking god awful place even existed in the first place.) He leaned his face in close to the side of Michael's neck, half unaware of himself as for a moment he was swept up in a sort of abject ecstasy. After so many years of peeing on Michael Townley's tombstone, sitting on it, glaring at it... _yes, and crying_ on it like some kind of sad sack abandoned retriever... just touching the tubby son of a bitch occasionally still came off as minorly miraculous. The image of Michael bleeding out in the snow came back around, and the Canadian's fingers dug painfully into the side of his companion's shoulder, whether out of fear or anger, it was impossible to tell.

With a sudden jerk, Trevor released Michael and shoved him bodily away. The same hand circled back around to slap Townley's ass cheek, _hard_. And then Trevor was kicking out his front door again, skipping out onto the porch with the faintest giggle.

"So what'll it be?" He called over his shoulder, his distance muting the sound of his voice. "The shooting range? Strippers? _Prostitutes_? _Stripper prostitutes_ with _guns_?"

Patricia followed them out the door, waving from the entrance. "Have fun, boys!"

  
*  


The 180 degree shift in Trevor's mood was fortunate, yes, but it also gave Michael's reptile heart a twinge of regret for having been so _easily_ manipulated. Trevor was genuinely excited, _labrador retriever_ excited at the prospect of hanging out with Michael. The distance between them that Michael had been so carefully cultivating since moving into the trailer was eradicated in the time it took for a sunburnt arm to crook around his neck.

Michael immediately held his breath when pushed into such close proximity to Trevor's armpit—he'd had enough disturbingly arousing smell memories for the day already, thank you. Trevor's rant sailed over his head just outside of his consciousness (something about hunting?) as he concentrated on forcing his body to not experience what he was experiencing. He just managed to hold his breath through Trevor's enigmatic shoulder squeeze and was about to let it out quietly before he felt a hard _whack_ on his posterior.

"JESUS," he coughed, his ass cheek tingling numb and his head and neck coated in Trevor's sweat. He watched dazedly as Trevor skipped out the door ahead of him, wondering briefly, futilely, what the fuck he was getting himself into. With one last apologetic glance to Mrs. Madrazo he set off after him, jogging a little to keep up.

He ran through the possibilities quickly in his head. Shooting range was probably not the best idea, seeing as his best friend had just topped himself up on meth was likely a little _moody_. Prostitutes were out—he hadn't visited one since his last blow up with Amanda, and besides he wasn't really sure how that would go down, the two of them... anyway. Best to stay out of that area.

That left darts at the bar or the strip club. Darts could go the same way as guns, though it would probably take Trevor a couple more seconds to kill him with a dart than with a gun.

"I don't know, any good strip clubs around here?" he asked airily, like he hadn't given the matter any thought. He noticed his eyes were lingering on Trevor's pink ass and snapped them back up. Trevor hadn't noticed—thank god for Binco sunglasses.

  
*  


"Come on, Michael, you're so _repressed_! Pull that cork out of your ass and admit you've looked at a map and marked every titty bar between here and Timbuktu!" Trevor half turned as they walked towards the car to sharply jab his elbow into Michael's paunch. "Remember: I _know_ you, Mr. Michael De Townley, de... fucking... de... _fuckface_ \- _god_ , what is the _deal_ with that _fake_ last _name_ , brother? Did you pick it out because you wanted telemarketers to assume that you WEREN'T the whitest cornfed piece of trailer trash on the planet? Couldn't you at least pick something _authentic_?"

The pilot snorted with disgust and judgment, then vaulted bodily into the front seat of his Bodhi, clearly amped up from the meth not only mentally, but definitely physically as well. He waited with surprising patience as Michael slid into the passenger side, before turning the engine over and flicking on the radio. Suicidal Tendencies blasted at full volume as Trevor pulled out of his parking spot and tore down the gravel road.

" _So.._." After about a mile, Trevor settled his elbow out the drivers side window and glanced sideways at the man next to him. Michael's shirt whipped violently around his broad shoulders as they zoomed down the road, and for a long lingering moment before speaking again, Trevor was reminded of seeing something similar to this during happier times. Michael Townley's windy, confident grin, on a young and handsome face. Michael Townley behind a pair of aviators as he unhesitatingly slammed his foot down on the gas.

Those sort of memories. The ones that occasionally made Trevor's shorts feel uncomfortably tight.

A slice of the carnivorous Trevor returned as he carried on, fingers curling sensually around the steering wheel. " _mmmmmmh_...While mommy's away, _Mikey will play_ , eh?" He teased, thinking of both Amanda with sustained spite and Michael with covetousness. "Just... DON'T marry one of these, ok? Fending off just _one_ of your families is PLENTY GOOD for ol' Trevor, thanks."

  
*  


Sandy Shores wasn't so bad, once you were in a car and had some wind in your hair. Michael draped his arm out the window and just enjoyed the silence between them (of course it wasn't _silent_ silence, thank you Suicidal Tendencies), the feeling of the wind drying the sweat out of his arm hair. He knew he needed a shower something _terrible_ , but something nostalgic and biological in him was remembering how good it felt to actually sweat, if just to feel that sweat evaporate. He could feel Trevor's eyes on him but it didn't bother him—it all felt familiar in a way that wasn't immediately threatening, for once.

Until, of course, he heard that deep pitch come into Trevor's voice. That was familiar too, his body told him, but in a way he was actively trying to prevent himself from revisiting. He pushed that sound to the back of his skull, buried it deep. For later, maybe. Once the imminent danger had passed.

"Nah, I'm good," he said, angling his face farther out the window as they wound around the lake, began passing through a more wooded area. "I think I'll just continue to fuck up with the one I got, thanks."

"Besides, I don't think you'll have to do too much fending off at the moment. They've made it clear that they're pretty well tired of my fat ass."

Michael wasn't really in the mood to think about his family. Not in the car on the way to a strip club. Not now, not here. Being around Trevor like this, just the two of them, he was beginning to drift into a headspace he hadn't been in in a long while. He would have to be vigilant not to fall too far into it, but... a little couldn't hurt. It smoothed some of the tension with Trevor, anyway.

Best to change the subject.

"You uh, come here often?" he asked lamely.

  
*  


"Honestly, I'm surprised Amanda _doesn't appreciate_ your fat ass _more_ than she does, Mikey. ESPECIALLY considering what a caboose she had, back in the day. When she lived in that trailer with you on the hill? _HOOO-IE!_ Remember how mad she got when she got pregnant? Ah well, I guess getting lard vacuum-sucked out of your body through a tube is your reward at the end of the day for being such a _long suffering_ , and certainly _understanding_ wife. I mean, she would have to be. And here I thought all this time that she was something of an ass connoisseur?"

Michael didn't want to talk about his family? OK. They would talk about his family. They would _still_ be fucking talking about his family when Trevor sucked Michael Townley's wedding ring off his stupid, stumpy ring finger and spit it down a sewer.

"What happened with YOU, then, Michael?" Trevor pulled roughly into a gravel spot outside of a small one-story building with wood panel exterior. "You're a millionaire, what happened to YOUR liposuction? Or are you more concerned with NOT getting a suntan outdoors while you drink yourself _slowly_ to death, instead of just _drowning_ yourself _quickly_ in your 2 million dollar pool to the tune of a melodramatic Neil Young song?"

The strip club bore a broken neon sign. It was half-illuminated and barely visible in the afternoon light, though the pipes that comprised it were tall, and when they stood by the front door it could be clearly read to say "THE SLIPPERY DOLPHIN".

As they walked up to the bouncer at the door, Trevor pulled on an old stained gray shirt he had dragged out from the back seat of the Bodhi. They exchanged brief words with the door man right away, (there was a devastating lack of crowd lined up for a midday visit,) and entered with little fanfare.

"-And YES, Michael, in answer to your query, I DO come here. Often!" The Canadian slowed a step to sling his arm back around Michael's neck as they entered the main floor together. "-but the ladies don't seem to _like it very much_ when I do it on their faces, so more or less when I come here I do it _by_ _myself_."

  
*  


Michael's eyebrow twitched in annoyance, but he didn't bother interrupting Trevor's monologue about his wife's ass. Or was it his ass? He wasn't even totally sure which ass was the focus of appreciation and/or scorn. When Trevor was drugged up and feeling loquacious he found it easier to just let him talk himself out.

"Oh, you know me, T," Michael said, unable to take his eyes off the bar's frankly horrifying mascot/caricature/logo/nightmare piece—a naked woman with impossible breasts riding a slick purple dolphin that was fucking _winking at him_. "I like to keep it aaaallll natural."

Once they passed the velvet purple curtains into the main room, they were greeted by two floor girls. They both were covered in some sort of luminescent sheen that glowed (purple, of course) faintly in the bar's dim light. Their white teeth shone ominously in the dark.

Trevor's comment about coming on faces echoed inside his head, and he briefly wondered if a black light in a strip clubwas really the wisest business idea. He suddenly had a vision of a reporter in suit and tie sweeping a UV light across a booth: "As you can see, there are at least 12 different types of biological matter on this one surface alone..."

"Welcome to the Slippery Dolphin, fellas," said Girl A. "Can we get you something to drink, help you feel more comfortable?"

"Yes," Michael said a bit desperately, trying to excoriate the image of this girl with a glowing Trevor facial from his brain. "Double bourbon for me, neat. Thanks, beautiful," he added, out of habit rather than conviction.

He let Trevor guide him to a booth over on the side of the stage. Not out in the middle of the room, but not in too dark of a corner either. He was starting to feel a bit like he was physically walking into the past. Like if he looked too hard in a corner he would see a younger version of himself and a younger version of Trevor huddled together, laughing over something irrelevant, touching each other casually. He decided not to look in any corners.

He sat down with his back to the wall, the old cushions sagging under his weight. He spread his arms out along the back of the seat and let out a long sigh. This was okay. This was going to be okay. He was going to have a couple drinks, get Trevor revved up on some girl, and have a completely heterosexual and yet marriage-preserving experience. No big deal.

Where the _fuck_ was that drink.

  
*  


They had been like this so many times before. The curtain color was different sometimes, the girls were different, maybe the drinks took a slight variation in shelf quality or quantity, but the rest of it, for all intents and purposes, was _tradition_.

Michael _always_ drank bourbon. Sometimes by the shot, sometimes sweating over a melting swirl of translucent ice cubes. The smell of it stuck to him, even back then... back before, when things between them had still felt natural. ( _Or, at least, as natural as the two of them had ever been able to be._ ) His expression in a strip club was pretty much always the same as well, Trevor observed. Michael _De Santa_ was wran. Full of concerned crinkle lines and reticent anxiousness. Michael _Townley_ had enjoyed the confidence of youth, riding the constant high that living The Game successfully always brought on. Trevor remembered Michael Townley with his pockets bursting with cash, his face flush with pleasure as he spent indiscriminately on himself, and on his best friend. But _both_ Michaels had a sort of prescient, sexual aura in the presence of mostly-naked women that Trevor was hard-pressed to ignore. Actually, _hard_ was a good word for it. Like, really, _really_ hard. It was a literal and metaphorical pain which had never really faded away, remaining more or less insistent through Michael's early years, through his somewhat hobbyish pursuit of running whores for a few sexually charged months, and at last to this moment. Even when he was fat, old and useless, one look at Michael's face was all Trevor needed to confirm what getting an eyeful of strange tits and pussy still did to his best friend. It fucked with him, on a thoroughly biological level.

The Canadian fisted his pint and gulped it down, then wracked a hairy forearm across his mustache to rub the foam away. The meth and alcohol buzzed in his system, warring forces whose only mutually agreed upon purpose was facilitating the problem in and around the area of Trevor's crotch. He had sported a half-woody from the meth before they'd even arrived, but the onslaught of naked breasts and Michael's close proximity had exacerbated the situation to the point of pain. Trevor gruffly readjusted himself in his tight shorts as he stared at Michael hawkishly from the other side of the booth.

It was a problem... to feel underlying betrayal every moment he spent with the same man he simultaneously wanted to fuck as hard as possible into the side of a grimy bathroom stall. (Or _vice versa_. Trevor was equal opportunity, here.) It was a desire fueled a little by revenge, _a lot_ by anger, and a FUCK TON by something scarily close to love. (What was that word? What did it even fucking mean?) Either way, the fact that they had never _actually_ fucked was a constant barb in Trevor's _extremely_ detailed and possessive mental roll of all of his interactions with Michael Townley.

Fucked? No. But... _other things_? Ten years was a long time, but they had been friends for almost all their lives.

" _Hrrmmmmmm, hey Mikey_...You remember that time I _jerked you off_ under the table that time at that skin joint in Nebraska?" The hungry pilot queried entirely out of the blue, just as a topless waitress was setting a pitcher of beer down on the table between them. She fumbled with the handle and looked up at Trevor in surprise, as his eyes shot down to linger creepily on her tits. After a pause, he sat forward with a casual wave of his hand, leaning down on his elbows to run a filthy nail around the rim of his glass.

"We were kids!" He justified to her, his tone sounding like he was merely discussing some boyhood prank. "One word of advice to you, sweetheart, NEVER have a son. Boys are DISGUSTING, _pestilential_ creatures."

The fat old snake was way too complicit in this situation. By FAR, too complicit. Trevor only wanted to lay on the table what everybody was already thinking. He glanced back to Michael with a salacious quirk of an eyebrow. "... _right, Mikey_?"

  
*  


For fuck's sake.

Michael's sole purpose (alright, not exactly sole purpose if he was being truly honest with himself—but where was the utility in that? An honest-with-himself Michael was just waiting to implode under the weight of his own hypocrisy) in bringing Trevor to this fucking weird titty bar was to get some of that energy worked out on a girl, hell—a dog, an armchair, _anywhere_ other than Michael. And what comes out of his smug, _wet_ (wait) mouth not two fucking seconds after Michael finishes his third drink? Some ancient history about jacking Michael off under a table. History that Michael hasn't even thought about in at LEAST eight days.

He's been careful not to reference it in any way, too. Their... history. Some part of him—to be precise, the exact part of him that _didn't_ want to shove Trevor against the wall and press his face into his hair when he'd B &E'd his way back into Michael's life a few weeks ago—was hoping they could just forget it. Never mention it again. Let bygones be bygones, right? What were a few (dozen) hand jobs between friends? They were kids. They were horny, and stupid. It's not like they were _dating_. Had _feelings_ for each other. Was it even possible for someone like Trevor to love someone? Was it possible for _Michael_?

But the hope that he could keep the past the past was definitely shattered, thanks to Trevor. And maybe it was the purple tits, or the bourbon, or yellow eyes burning into the side of his skull, but Michael's resolve was starting to go with it.

"… _right, Mikey_?" came the sneer, the old dare. _Remember?_

"That's right, sweetheart," Michael said, addressing the waitress but locking eyes with Trevor. "Boys are filthy. They only ever have one thing on their mind."

Dragging his eyes off Trevor's, he beckoned to the waitress, who was still standing at their table in a polite confusion that belied her newness to the job. He leaned in close to her, smelling the sweetness of her perfume, and underneath that the sort of chemical smell he assumed came from whatever purple spray tan she and the rest of the girls had on.

"Bring me another bourbon, alright?" he asked in a low voice, and rested his palm on her ample cellulite hip, curving his fingers just behind her ass to touch the line of her silver panties. She flushed at the touch—maybe not as new to this as he thought, if she could command that kind of bodily response—and gave him a smile.

"Sure thing, hon. But no touching, at least where they can see you."

"Of course, my apologies." He dragged his fingernail lightly across the hem as he withdrew his hand. As she went to retrieve the drink, he saw that his palm was now dusted purple.

"Hey look, T," he said, holding his palm up. "I've been caught purple handed." Okay he was maybe a little tipsy. And was it his imagination or was Trevor a little closer to him now than he was a minute ago?

He was feeling… better. Now that Trevor had put that part of their past on the table, it was a little less terrifying. His body was feeling good, warm. He could feel a hairy leg pressing against his, the wiry hair tangling in his own.

"So tell me," he said, pouring himself a beer while he waited on his bourbon. "Why d'you gotta bring up that shit? You pissed I didn't return the favor? I'd offer to now but—" he wiggled his purple hand and grinned.

  
*  


"Oh, get _off_ it already. You and your fucking _high horse_. You are _the_ most hypocritical, _sexually deficient_ washed up has-been that I have EVER met… and THAT, my friend? ..is _really_ saying something."

Why DID he have to bring _'that shit'_ up, as Michael had so loquaciously paraphrased? Underneath the table, Trevor's erection throbbed painfully. He gritted his teeth and stalwartly ignored it, though his eyes followed the clean spot on the waitress's ass that Michael had cleared with an insane level of attention. Visions of that hand sweeping downward replayed in an endless stream. A hand that didn't wear a wedding ring.

Having a hard-on was more or less a constant state of affairs for a man like Trevor Philips… for a man who had more _drugs_ and _whores_ lodged up his orifices than science could ever feasibly believe possible. And he _liked it_ like that. It dulled the pain of _being alive_. Furthermore, it had been a completely sufficient solution until about three weeks ago. (Actually, _three weeks, two days, eleven hours ago_.) The problem here, was painfully, ( _painfully, GOD, he could not express just HOW painfully,)_ obvious. The problem, Trevor understood with an unhealthy dose of denial and anger, was… just… Michael. Just Michael. Michael insinuating that he would even _dream_ of returning the favor of a hand job now seemed more consuming and important than fucking Ashley Williams up the ass had EVER been. God, why was he ON EDGE all of a sudden? It couldn't POSSIBLY be the drugs. OR the alcohol. OR the deep and resonating throes of BETRAYAL and RAGE which were also on constant replay in Trevor's mind when concerning his resurrected best friend. Right now, anger and arousal once again played a confusing duet, and he finally broke away from the distant waitress to look back at Michael with as much _'normal'_ bravado as he could muster. It failed, of course. Trevor didn't understand _'normal'_ behavior on a fundamental level. But what he came up with was passable enough. He was angrier and more afraid of Michael at the moment than he was horny. And ten years… well, ten year was a long fucking time.

Beneath the table, he gave his woody a squeeze and grinned a dry, yellow grin.

"Now look, it's not like my johnson here isn't _already_ purple, Mikey, now ain't that true? Hell, I'm surprised it hasn't knocked over a goddamn beer glass yet! _But that's the way of it_ , eh? I'm a man! _Belles femmes provocatrices_? Beautiful bodies everywhere?"

Trevor licked his lips, sweat having broken out across his whole body in a fine sheen. "Young, nubile flesh? Everyone has _basic needs_ , you _pathetic dried-up old man_. I thought you'd _remember_ what it was like for your… ah… chubby little _fella_ down there to get some _service!_ And you used to be so GOOD at getting that service _provided_ for you too, back in the day! …Geez, what's with this _interrogation_? I can't reminisce with my best pal about the good ol' days without getting ramrodded by _accusations_? Just because I HAVE AN ERECTION does NOT mean that I was specifically requesting a HAND JOB, you archaic turd." His eyes flitted hungrily between Michael and the waitress once more. "Or not from YOU, anyway."

Was he impotent? Was he sterile? Why? WHY, he asks.

Trevor mulled on the past as he forced out a cough. "How about some lap dances instead?" For a moment he seemed to glance sideways at his friend, as if afraid for once in his life to follow up on an impulse.

Memories of Michael, back then. Of the way he smelled, like dirt and sour sweat clinging to old cotton.

"…Or did you already forget we were in a den of inequities, _Michael_?" After a long pause, the name spilled out across the table between them, half a caress, half an accusation. Trevor glared through a flush, and brought his pint glass back up to his lips for another greedy gulp.

  
*  


"Alright, man, calm down calm down, everything's okay. The mood swings are better, I see," he said, punctuating his sarcasm with a sip of beer and a raised eyebrow. But it wasn't mean spirited in the slightest—an old warmth flooded him in the presence of this anxious, off-balance Trevor. He felt powerful, almost protective. The precarious power balance between them seemed to be tipped in his favor, at least for the moment. He knew he was a real piece of shit for conceptualizing their relationship that way, but he couldn't help it—he was a thief at heart, and a thief was always calculating.

He realized he was now sitting almost on the same side of the booth as Trevor, his outstretched arm draped behind Trevor's shoulders. Not touching, but only just. Another calculation, operating just above the thickening haze of alcohol and lust that was buzzing through him. And he wasn't alone—the obscene shape in Trevor's shorts told him as much.

He was thankful Trevor hadn't noticed the small shiver that went through him when he'd said whatever it was about bells and cockatrices. Fucking hell, Michael had almost forgotten about the French _. Rule Number 4,_ he recited internally, a kind of mantra. _Rule Fucking Number 4._

He'd had a number of rules, back in the day, when it came to him and Trevor. He'd scribbled them on a bar napkin one night when he was piss-drunk, then made the bartender eat it to destroy all evidence. They went like this:

Rule Number 1: No kissing. This was a given, almost, and seemed to be mutual. It was also, sometimes, the hardest one to abide by.

Rule Number 2: No sucking Trevor's dick. He'd never given him a blow job, not once. Hell, he'd _rarely_ reciprocated the hand jobs. (God he was an asshole.)

Rule Number 3: No fucking. Nothing in his ass, and nothing in Trevor's. This was the _second_ hardest to abide by.

Rule Number 4: Never, under any circumstances, let Trevor know about his horrible, fucking cliched-as-hell boner for Trevor speaking French.

None of Michael's rules had anything to do with lack of desire, or even lack of experience. He'd spent plenty of time in mens' shower rooms, both on the high school football team and in prison. The rules were about retaining _power balances_. There was the aforementioned one between the two of them, of course, which was usually tipped in his favor back then thanks to his rules and to young Trevor's tragically misplaced puppy-dog admiration.

But much more than that, it was about a power balance _within himself_.

Sometimes when he was around Trevor he would get this vertiginous feeling, like he was standing on the edge of a precipice. They didn't even have to be fucking around—hell, he'd felt it the first day he'd seen him. Watching Trevor puking his guts out after shooting a stranger in the eyeball, his own stomach finally, mercifully empty, he'd suddenly gotten the feeling he was about to sleepwalk off a cliff. That was the beginning of Rule Number 1—he decided right then that he could never kiss this man, even though everything in his body told him to _right then_ , on top of a corpse, their mouths filled with acid and bile. He'd built a little wall that day, to keep himself from waltzing off the edge.

That wall was a lot taller now, but a lot older too, and pieces of it were starting to crumble away. He wanted to tongue Trevor's cock through those stupid pink shorts. But he could settle for a lap dance.

"How could I forget? What other kind of place has so many purple tits? I'll probably be shitting this stuff tomorrow," he said, indicating his purple palm. The topless gal appeared back at their table with his bourbon in hand.

"Say, sweetheart, how much for a dance for my buddy here?" he said, finally curling his arm around Trevor's shoulders and shaking him slightly, playing the annoying older brother angle.

She glanced at Trevor, obviously assessing risk. "I'm working the floor now, hon, this isn't exactly my shift…"

"Come onnn," he goaded. "I'll make it worth your while." He flashed her a trademark grin. A Townley original.

"Oh… alright. But don't tell my boss," she flirted, and extended her hand to pull Trevor up out of the booth. Michael "helped" by pushing him from the back, playing up his drunkenness for an excuse to touch his back, the muscles beneath his shoulder blades. He grabbed his bourbon off the table and wandered after them as she led Trevor to a chair in the back of the room, away from the stage. It was important to him that it be _this_ girl, the one whose flesh he'd already touched, who did this for Trevor. She was a gift. A power-play. A conduit.

He swirled his bourbon in his glass and watched.

  
*  


She was young. Possibly 20, maybe a little older. From a distance and in the dark of the club, her purple flesh seemed flawless. The curve of her ass just below the panty line was an immediate source of attention, for obvious reasons. Beneath the purple paint, a little of her natural flesh color showed through in a finger-shaped gash. Her ass was beautiful. Majestic, one might even supply, but it was really that cleft that made the difference between _'sexy'_ and _'dick-might-actually-explode'_ levels of hotness. It resembled the soft belly flesh Trevor remembered cutting away from the corpse of a doe after skinning it. That part of her was sensuous…. It called out to be touched again, in the way her ample hips plumped out just a little from the constraints of her minimal clothing. Her demeanor was well-crafted. She moved with expertise as she pushed Trevor down into the soft chair, her breasts brushing his cheeks in a soft caress. But up close, it was easier to see a myriad of small, unsettling scars, as well as the dead look in her eye… The Look all women in the profession wore, hidden behind a thick inch of metallic eyeshadow and cheap fake lashes. To that end, the Canadian sympathized with her, if only briefly. It was a fucking terrible world, she was right. But their money was green, and she had a job to do. With his hands on her thighs, she came down on top of him and dragged the silky polyester covering her pussy across the bulge in his shorts. The friction hitched his breath in his chest, even as she theatrically moaned and rolled back until strands of her long yellow hair tickled Trevor's knees. Obviously, she was a show pony. In other words, she was _perfect_ for Michael.

Blond. Young. Cheap. Everything Michael wanted, and more. He smoothed a hand up her thigh.

"You know, my mother was a dancer once..!" Trevor supplied in an oblivious tone, his attention clearly focused on the way the woman's tits pooled back and became like jiggling yolks sitting on her ribcage as she bent backwards. She flipped back up again and smiled at him, before spinning and hitting the floor with her hands, backing up to roll her ass in a ripple across Trevor's now absurdly rock hard dick to the heavy bass of club music. He palmed the globes of her ass, enjoying the pleasurable release that grinding on the lump in his shorts was bringing on, even if just in small doses.

The depravity of it all, the superficial attraction, the odd chemical body paint smell, the crusty chair beneath him, the self-loathing that barely hid behind going through the motions… all of it could have been attractive enough on it's own. The situation was sick and depressing in all the ways Trevor liked most. Sure, this girl was being paid, but it was sexy that way. Kind of. It had been a fucking century since Trevor Philips had fucked or been fucked by someone who wasn't also getting something else out of that arrangement. Pay-As-You-Go was the way of the world. But MICHAEL. Christ, Michael was staring like a lecherous old troll from some distance away, and the mere concept of his proximity, much less actually being able to _stare him down_ as he inhaled the aroma of crotch sweat, was nearly unbearable. Trevor's yellow eyes, rimmed with the deep purple gutters of sleeplessness, flicked up to stare Townley in the face as he wracked his hands across the dancer's naked tits.

"NO TOUCHING!" a bouncer half-heartedly demanded as he patrolled in a wide arc past their nook. The bar was mostly empty, though as evening came on, a few leathery regulars were beginning to file in and fill up the stools at the bar. Trevor's hands went down to knead at the armrests of the red lounge chair he sat in.

He wanted to touch Michael. The desire came on in a sudden gush, and Trevor's jaw clenched tightly as his best friend's visage passed in and out of view from behind the undulating naked woman in his lap. (He looked so _fucking_ magnanimous. _Jesus_.) Trevor imagined shoving Michael's fat, square jaw into the linoleum floor as he roughly thrust into him. He imagined slapping Michael, hard. He thought about what it would be like to swing an axe straight into Michael' chest, how the ribs would snap and the blade would lodge itself in cartilage and sinew until he would be forced to rip it out again in a geyser of blood. He wanted Michael to scream at him. He _needed_ Michael to hurt him. He wanted Michael to speak to him softly, to tell him everything was going to be fine. He wanted Michael to fuck him like it was their wedding night. _But it was all so fucking pointless._

Why was he alone? Trevor growled low and deep to himself as the young woman pressed a slender thigh between his legs. Why JUST him? Was this girl supposed to be an apology? Or was it distraction? The clenched teeth in his mouth clenched harder, even as one corner of his mouth quirked up in a half-snarl, half-grin. Mostly, it was frustration that fueled him now. After all, Michael was a piece of shit when it came to things like his sex life. Or, the non-existence of sed sex life, more specifically. Or even MORE specifically, he had always been haughty and self-centered when it came to 'their shit'.

They'd had rules. They never talked about it, but those fucking rules had haunted Trevor for years. Their mere existence had goaded him on in hundreds of fruitless attempts. He had pushed, and like a misbehaving dog, had been put back into place every fucking rules were there for a reason. He knew it. Michael knew it. Their agreement had parameters, but as they settled in, the rules became like a bad taste Trevor could never figure out how to wash entirely from his mouth.

1\. No kissing. Trevor had never understood this one, but feared it nonetheless. Michael had never brought it up, and mostly kissing seemed like a waste of time. Trevor had always had a certain phobia about kissing anyway, ever since that time when he'd been twelve and his second stepfather had locked them in the broom closet. (He'd ended up with cum in his hair and half a severed finger in his left breast pocket.)

2\. Michael did. Not. Suck. Cock. Trevor was lucky if Michael was even courteous enough to wrap even one callused hand around Trevor's hard-on, much less wrap that narrow frown around it. It was a rule implemented to quietly assure Trevor that there was no happy ending in expecting too much.

3\. They didn't fuck. They just didn't. There was no thought here, only a penetrating black haze of frustration and fear.

4\. Under NO circumstances, was Trevor EVER to breathe a single word to Michael about being in love with him. This rule, perhaps the saddest one, was self-applied, and fixedly adhered to. And yet, sometimes Trevor had felt that Michael somehow just... _knew_. That despite all their NOT kissing and NOT fucking each other but still knocking over stores and planning heists over cold coffee and eggs or running knee deep through a field of snow away from a battalion of cops, that SOMEHOW, at some point… it had snuck past. And that Michael did his best to pretend not to see. It was a concept that terrified Trevor, his own panicked voice now doubling back again to him as the stripper wracked his chest with her long nails.

' _I'm not gonna leave you, Mikey!'_

Trevor locked eyes with Michael over the woman's nubile shoulders, and pointedly stroked himself through his shorts.

  
*  


 _What a fucking moron_.

Michael cursed himself mentally over and over again as he watched the scene unfolding before him. _What a numbskull. What a twat_. He'd thought he was in control, _huh_? Thought he was the _big man in charge_?

The plan had been what, to just _watch_ Trevor, stand there twirling his glass and smirking like a fucking faggot while Trevor got hard? Then convince some girl to go out back and blow him? Like he was some dickless horse breeder and Trevor was a stallion he had to get milked? Was that actually the fucking plan?

Brilliant, Townley. Except Michael _de Santa_ hadn't had sex in three months, hadn't seen Trevor in nine years, and hadn't reckoned on what would come over his body in this moment. He felt the previous power and confidence drain away to be replaced by _pathetic_ , _needy_ lust, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

He brought his glass to his lips again and pretended to drink. He didn't want to finish it, needed it to stay just full enough so he could keep bringing it to his mouth every ten seconds, a nervous tic to hide his face when he could feel impassivity slipping. He traced his upper lip with the rim of the glass, wet it, licked it off, took another fake sip.

Michael wanted to keep eye contact with Trevor but couldn't stop his eyes from roaming, zoning in on certain areas. Like Trevor's hands, grimy and strong, where they weren't ghosting over the girl's flesh like a lover's but _kneading_ it, _wracking_ it almost. His crotch tightened helplessly at the sight of the creases in her flesh were Trevor's fingers dug mercilessly into her. The opposite of Michael's earlier _caresses._ He was a limp fucking noodle compared to Trevor and he fucking knew it. He felt like a Chihuahua watching a Rottweiler fuck. Forced to hump the chaise lounge.

His imagination was starting to get away from him in earnest. When she dropped her hands on the floor and began gyrating her ass in that ridiculous pose, he imagined Trevor grabbing her hips and just fucking into her. No one would be able to do anything, be able to stop it, until Trevor finished. Hell, at this point he'd _personally_ fight off everyone in the club until Trevor emptied his sticky wad of psychocum deep, deep inside her. Sure, she'd be taken by surprise but it was her own fucking fault—didn't she know not to dangle steak in front of a crocodile?

God, he was really starting to get hard now. In a way that would soon become noticeable even in the dim light of the bar, to someone 20 yards away, in outer fucking space. The skin from his crotch down to the inside of his knees felt on fire, every brush of his horrible Binco cargo shorts (For Dad™) against his thighs felt with painful intensity. He wouldn't be able to endure this much longer, but still he watched.

He wanted Trevor to fuck her. He wanted to wait at her mouth and feed her hundred dollar bills while Trevor fucked her until she couldn't stand. He wanted to hear the animal sounds, the wet slapping of Trevor's balls against puffy labia. He wanted—

"How about a dance, sugar?" came the cigarette-smoke voice. He whirled around to see another girl, a dancer he recognized from the stage. He could still see beads of sweat at her hairline. Her coquettish smile was offset by one blinding tooth, an obvious replacement, perhaps from some earlier adventure in this very bar.

Michael gaped at her and withdrew his hand from his waistband (when had that gotten there?). He tried to imagine this woman grinding on him, saw in his mind's eye his own fat, pathetic body lunging up at her, rubbing out on her thigh in 15 seconds of mortifying bliss. He licked his lips and glanced back at Trevor. They locked eyes—until Michael flicked his gaze downward, to where Trevor was openly stroking himself through his shorts, the flimsy fabric dragging and catching on the head.

_Oh fuck._

"Excuse me," he said to the woman, pushing his half-empty drink into her hand and brushing past her. She made an offended noise, but he was already gone, his stubby legs taking him as fast and far away from Trevor as possible without actually broadcasting that he was _running the fuck away._

He scanned the club for the Mens' Room sign, altered his course toward it. It was through another pair of horrid purple curtains and a crusty door. Its surface was _sticky,_ like someone had recently peeled a layer of stickers off it but had neglected to soap off the residue.

Inside was what amounted to a gas station bathroom, with a couple urinals and two stalls. There was one weedy guy washing his hands at the sink. Michael grabbed him by his three-foot beard, knocking his camo hunting hat into the basin.

" _Beat it,_ " he growled into the meth-addled face. When he released him, the skinny trucker scampered out the door without a sound.

Michael left the sink running and pushed open the right stall door. It was disgusting, sure, but it would have to do. It didn't lock,naturally, but the toilet did mysteriously still have a lid. He lowered it, yanked his pants down over his knees and sat on the closed toilet. His ass cheeks spread open on the cold, grimy surface in a way that was unspeakably pleasurable. He shifted his body at an angle, spreading his ass a little wider, and lifted one flip-flopped foot to put pressure on the door to keep it closed. Then he gingerly pulled his dick and balls out up over the waistband of his boxer shorts. The elastic felt great, squeezing his balls upward as he started to fist his cock. He let his other hand run over the inside of his thigh, his fingers playing in the fine hair there.

He just had to take care of this little problem, is all. Once this was over, he would be in the clear.

  
*  


It wasn't that Trevor wanted to KILL this woman… He just wanted to FACE FUCK her until she choked on his cum and passed out.

Now, was that really so strange? It seemed like a _perfectly reasonable_ thing to have a fetish for, considering what fucking a corpse was ACTUALLY like. The Canadian briefly entertained the fantasy of rending apart maggot-ridden flesh, of grinding into cold bone, and then let the vision go away again. That was a dark place Trevor didn't like to voluntarily go to alone. Not unless he absolutely had to. He was more about _hot_ blood. The kind that gushed out over your hands in a vital torrent. Living blood. That is, unless it was in a stew.

Michael had been gone for ten minutes to fuckall knows where by the time Trevor shoved a wrinkled $50 bill into the string of the dancer's metallic panties. She glanced at it once with the dead-eyed look, then glanced up at him again with a sensuous smirk as crafted as her perfectly applied orange lipstick. Michael's finger tracks had vanished in a new series of gouges made in her body paint by Trevor's own gnarled hands, and as he pointedly looked down at his erection and back up to her again, purple stains and his own precum grossly spotted the front of his shorts.

The men's bathroom door slammed open hard enough to leave a dent from the handle in the cheap plaster wall. Trevor drunkenly stumbled inside, pulling the woman behind him with a strong hand wrapped around her fragile arm. They shuffled loudly across the room, and Trevor's back hit the wall by the hand dryer with another resounding thud.

"You know, my _mother_ was a stripper once…" He slurred at her, and she giggled fakely as she went down on her knees.

"I know, baby, you told me three times!"

She pulled back the elastic waistband of Trevor's now fully disgusting shorts, and pulled his rock hard boner out with a manicured hand. She stroked it a few times, looking coyly up at the disgruntled pilot as he shoved a plastic snifter up each nostril (producing drugs _magically from nowhere_ being a Trevor Philips specialty,) then inhaled two sharp breaths. He held his air in until the dancer swallowed his cock, then let his head fall back with a thud to the wall and released a long, guttural groan.

" _ooooohhhhhhhhhhh, motherrrrrr!_ " He wracked his hands into her hair and clenched his teeth. The room was suddenly full of the obscene wet squelching sounds of rapid sucking.

Where the fuck had Michael gone? The thought pushed in over the liquid hot pleasure coursing down Trevor's legs. The mouth on his dick was what he needed. It hit his kneecaps in shivering tremors, threatening to bring him to the ground. He thought he would be hard forever. His pipes were BLOCKED UP in a seriously dangerous way. Michael De Fuckface needed to take responsibility. His fucking trollish leering had been the ultimate criminal source of this overly vital erection. So, of course, in _typical_ _Michael_ fashion, that meant Michael had vanished entirely. Trevor growled, and gave a sharp thrust forward, eliciting a surprised squeak from below him.

A cascade of debauched fantasies paraded before the Canadian... Mostly sexual, though acts of extreme violence, _as usual_ , also crept into the periphery. It was frightening as much as it was erotic, and Trevor's breath began to come in heavier gulps, his lips parting as he sucked in air through yellow teeth. He thought of Michael naked and asleep, like he'd seen him once back in North Yankton when he had stupidly left the door to his trailer unlocked. He stalked through the dark room, inhaling the lingering scent of cheap liquor and pussy that hung over Michael like a fog. He raised the axe up over his head.

Trevor dug both hands into the hair of the stripper and was now forcing her head down hard onto his cock, thrusting roughly up into her soft palette and ignoring the sounds of muffled protest squeezing out from around his hardness. Michael was fucking him. They were in some skeezy motel. They were young again, and full of piss and bravado. Michael's hard chest ground into his back, a thick fist shoving his face deep into the mattress. Trevor's dick was being wrenched until it spit up and over Michael's knuckles in a hot gush. Trevor's asshole was filling up with Michael's molten cum. He felt a deep, sated contentment. Amanda didn't exist. Brad and Lester didn't exist, nothing else was there, except them. Just their bodies, joined in stupid painful need. A need _finally_ being _satisfied_. They were alone, the rest of the world buried under a quiet blanket of thick snow.

" _fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck fuck FUCK-!"_

A real memory; Michael's callused hand slowly brushing over his best friend's crotch beneath a diner booth as Brad talked obliviously over blueprints of their recent score. Later, the taste of Michael's cock against his tongue. The feeling of his hands touching his hair in hesitant want. Michael's cum on his face and in his mustache. Smelling Michael for days afterward.

" _I love you, I love you, I lo_ -" suddenly, far to the right, Trevor caught a glance of a familiar dad-ish loafer beneath a closed stall door.

"- _uughhhh, Mikey_!"

Trevor braced himself bodily for the orgasm which pushed violently forward to the immediate horizon, just as the bathroom door slammed open for a second time.

"DESTINY. WHAT the FUCK? AGAIN? Get over here, GET BACK TO THE DRESSING ROOM."

The floor manager stalked across the room and ripped the stripper bodily away from Trevor's cock, leaving it cold and impossibly hungry. Blue balls set in and the Canadian let out an infinitely frustrated howl of anger.

The man was huge, bald, and with a tight black shirt and one dickish gold ring in his left earlobe. His fist went out next to yank Trevor off the far wall.

"And YOU. I've TALKED TO YOU about this. NEVER ON CLUB PREMISES. You're banned, motherfucker!"

"…. _What_ did you just say to me?" Trevor's voice bottomed out in a deadly gravel as he carefully tucked his woody with some pain back into his shorts. Even to a stranger, the aura of taking off your rings before a fight was transparent in the action. The manager turned bodily to face the challenge and they leveled eyes in a deadly stare-off, the larger man unaware of just how lucky few ever received warning before the explosion.

"I _said_ , you're a filthy shit stain that I need to wipe off my wall. You come in here and you _don't_ listen, you _don't_ play by the rules, and you take advantage of the girls. You're banned. _Motherfucker_!"

The room filled with crackling orange as Trevor bodily launched himself at the sneering bouncer. They hit the ground, hard, as Destiny the stripper let out a terrified, blood-curdling scream and fled the bathroom.

The wet, flat packing crunch of Trevor's fist landing home again and again began to drown out the garbled burble of blood filling his victim's mouth. "FIFTEEN IS THE _LEGAL AGE_ OF _CONSENT_ BACK WHERE I'M FROM!" The rage rushed over Trevor in a blinding tidal wave. "WHO ARE YOU TO JUDGE? TWO _CONSENTING ADULTS_ ARE ENTITLED TO DO _WHATEVER_ THEY WANT IN THEIR OWN PLACE OF RESIDENCE WITHOUT YOUR FUCKING _CONDESCENSION_! COULDN'T YOU _SEE_ THAT THIS ROOM WAS _OCCUPIED_? I WILL _FUCK_ YOUR _FUCKING_ EYE SOCKETS OPEN WITH MY UNSATISFIED BOY DOWN HERE SO THAT _NEXT TIME_ , YOU TAKE SOME _FUCKING CARE_ NOT TO _GET IN MY WAY_!"

Wet coughing sputters cut through the heavy room, and Trevor bent down with a final flourish to clamp his teeth around the bleeding man's gold earring. The bouncer howled in screaming pain as Trevor ripped himself back, taking the earring and part of the lobe with him in a bloody spray. He stood and spit it out on the bathroom floor as another bouncer ran in the room, took one horrified look at Trevor, and ran back out again.

Trevor rubbed one hairy forearm across his mouth to wipe away some of the blood, before turning like an exhausted wolf as the mood swing ebbed down to survey his surroundings. The front of his shirt was drenched in red, his erection was frustratingly larger than ever, and the room was steadily filling up with an increasingly loud rumble of panicky voices from the exterior floor.

"MICHAEL." The Canadian barked once as the sound of sirens began to be faintly detectable in the distance. "GET OFF THE SHITTER, IT'S TIME TO GO."

  
*  


Trevor's words rang in Michael's ears as he stared at his own cum cooling on the bathroom floor, right next to a fleck of spattered blood. After a long sigh, he slowly lowered his foot from the door. It was already falling open when he stood up and buckled his pants in weary, angry silence. He put his loafer over the cum stain and smeared it into the grime.

Everything that had just happened—everything he'd heard, done or hadn't prevented—was swept into back of his mind in one mental motion. His was the practiced mind of the liar, the murderer, and the hypocrite. There would be time for that later.

He cast a cold eye over Trevor and his corpse before stepping over them.

"Put your fucking dick in your pants," he growled as he passed, being careful not to step in the blood.

—

Michael cursed under his breath as he peered out from behind the heavy purple curtains masking the entrance to the restrooms. Most of the patrons had cleared out of the building, and the girls were nowhere to be seen—most likely whisked backstage by some silent guardian. In fact, the coast looked entirely clear; if it weren't for a flash of nervous white teeth from behind the nearby bar, Michael could have been a dead man.

Through the black light gloom Michael could see a man clutching an old double-barrel shotgun. He recognized him as one of the bouncers, probably the one who'd just witnessed the sight of a feral Trevor covered in his colleague's blood. He was pointing the gun with tremulous hands at the curtains, obviously waiting for them to emerge before he unloaded both barrels into their chests.

Silently, Michael held Trevor back from the door with his thick left forearm and slipped off his left loafer. After a beat, he threw it as hard as he could into the curtain, making it billow out into the room. Just as expected, the frightened man unloaded two shots into the curtains and Michael's poor shoe in quick succession. Then Michael ran.

He sprinted out from behind the curtain and launched himself over the bar. With ruthless efficiency, he wrestled the gun from the man's sweaty hands and slammed the butt into his forehead. He felt blindly under the bar for the shells before retrieving them, quickly reloading the gun, and dumping a dozen or so into his shorts' ridiculous number of pockets.

He recognized the strong smell of piss coming off the poor unconscious bastard. No doubt he'd wet himself after seeing Trevor on the bathroom floor, his dick red and angry and his torso covered in gore. He must have believed he'd seen a demon. _Not too fucking far off_ , Michael thought, and cocked the shotgun.

"MIKEY, LET'S GO," he heard Trevor roar over the sirens. Michael leapt over the prone, piss-covered form and made for the nearest exit. Outside, once his eyes had adjusted to the dusky light, he saw Trevor gesturing to him from the driver's seat of the Bodhi, eyes blazing, Channel X blaring. Without a backward glance at the Slippery Dolphin he climbed into the car and they peeled off onto the highway.

The sirens were growing deafening, and Michael could see multiple lights flashing in the rearview mirror.

"You _really_ know how to lay low, huh?" he said contemptuously, before turning around and unloading both barrels into the windshield of the nearest patrol car.

  
*  


Three things in this world made Trevor's dick jump with regular, frightening strength;

One: Ultraviolence.

Two: Self-acknowledged depravity.

And a staggering number Three: Michael Townley giving him angry orders.

If Trevor thought his balls had climbed _so far back into his body_ that he would _never_ be able to drag them out again, the sight of Michael Taking Care Of Business so fully reinvigorated him that it bypassed absurd and went straight on to comical. He clutched the part of him that rightly should have long ago rotted off, and all other thoughts completely melted away.

He reaction lasted a full ten seconds, before Trevor fell in line and followed the order. He understood later that if he'd felt winded at Michael's rough command to stuff his Johnson back into his shorts, by the time they were bolting out the side door and smelling like piss and blood, the feeling had became something more like exalted ecstasy. The criminal high tailed it through the parking lot in Michael's shadow, his eyes glued to his friend's broad shoulders through the cheap cotton of his ludicrous dad-wear. The shotgun was still clutched in his thick, hammy fists as he rolled into the drivers seat, and they tore down the road and into the thickening magenta sunset in a blaze of unadulterated fucking glory.

"…Mikey! _You, uh_ …" Trevor accelerated rapidly, his breathless admiration almost lost in the loud rush of wind, and the pounding of the radio. The words trailed off, incomplete, though he peppered Michael with stunned looks even as he took a sudden and dramatic turn off the pavement, kicking up gravel and smoke as they flew into an open field.

"…Wow! I mean... _really_ , buddy. _WOW_. I didn't think you still _had it in you_!"

"PULL OVER! THIS IS THE POLICE!"

"Michael, I've… I've always…"

Michael flicked the cops off before leaning out over the seat and leveling the barrel of the shotgun at the approaching police vehicle. His face was calm as he pulled the trigger, shattering the windshield of the cop car. It was a direct hit. A headshot, from the mist of gore splattered on what remained of the inside of the glass. Trevor watched it spin out behind them and immediately clutched his blazing erection with one hand for a momentary squeeze of unadulterated pleasure.

He roared in appreciation. " _Michael FUCKING Townley_!"

The next car pulled up level with them a moment later, and for a heartrending moment Michael fumbled with his pockets to reload his gun as red and blue flashed across his ruddy face. One fat cop leaned out of the passenger window and leveled his firearm.

" _HOOOOO-_ IE! HERE, PIGGY PIGGY! _COME ON!"_

With a swift jerk, Trevor slammed the body of his much larger Bodhi into the side of the car. There was a sickening crunch as the cop's forehead ricocheted off their sideview mirror before snapping unnaturally back. It too spun out and fell behind them, before immediately exploding as the next swerving car unavoidably collided with them head on. The explosion shook the ground, and soon they were leaving their pursuit behind in a cloud of dust as Trevor leaned his head back and howled with genuine exuberance.

"MICHAEL AND TREVOR TOGETHER AGAIN! Now THAT is how to have some goddamn FUN, M! WHEW!"

The adrenaline high coursed with them as Trevor drove out of the field and tangled into a stretch of complicated back alleys behind a drag of strip malls. He drove aggressively fast until the last possible moment, when with a final jerk, he yanked the car around and pulled it into a dark alcove behind a dumpster where they could lay low. Night was coming on as he cut the engine, and they were plunged into near darkness and total silence.

For a few long initial moments, the only sound was the distant muffled hum of sirens fading away, and Trevor's own labored breathing. His chest rose and fell in heavy gulps, and even in the dark it was obvious he was fisting his hard-on with aggressive sincerity.

" _Michael_." He breathed the name like it was a revelation. " _hrmmmmmnnnnn_ …Michael Townley _rides again_!"

He was lost, very clearly, in a distant memory of them in the past… memories of a time when they ran together in fearless chaos. His yellow eyes glimmered dangerously in the alley shade.

In a sudden shuffle of sharp elbows, Trevor threw a leg over Michael's thighs until he straddled him in the passenger seat. He braced his arms on either side of the other man's head, filling his personal space completely and pushing his insistent erection somewhere into the vicinity of Michael's belly button. He was horrifying; in the way that only someone who was covered in blood and seemed not to care at all about it could look.

Michael Townley _was_ alive. God help them, he wasn't dead after all. He was here. HERE. _Michael Townley was ALIVE._

" _Hmmm_ , What do ya say, Mikey?" He ground down on the body beneath him. "Just once, _for old timesake_?"

  
*  


When the loathsome, terrible sight of Trevor Philips encrusted in old blood climbed onto his lap, Michael held his body perfectly still. He had been expecting this. He met Trevor's yellow eyes while he writhed on top of him, his tongue flicking out to wet chapped, bloody lips. Slowly, Michael curled his left hand around the back of Trevor's neck only to savagely grab the skin there into his fist and hold tight, like he was scruffing a dog. His right hand grabbed onto Trevor's hard cock and yanked it savagely forward, eliciting a cry of mingled pleasure and pain.

His eyesight was white with fury. He wanted to kill Trevor, or fuck him apart, for being everything he was, everything Michael wanted, everything Michael could never be. For continuing to exist. For making him cum on a bathroom floor just from the sound of his own name in Trevor's mouth.

"You don't FUCK other people in a room with me, Trevor. I don't care if you see me or not, if there's a possibility, if I'm in the bar or the town or the fucking county, if there's a bathroom stall or a closet I could be in or a _fat fucking shadow_ you don't fuck somebody else's mouth and say MY fucking name. You hear me?" he roared, spraying spit onto Trevor's face. He punctuated his words with vicious twists and pulls on Trevor's ragged cock.

His dick really was kind of purple, actually. Either from stripper lipstick or just sustained erection. Trevor must have been hard for hours at this point—he wouldn't be long now. Suddenly Trevor's voice from before was echoing in Michael's head, three words repeated over and over. Michael had no idea how long Trevor had known he was in the bathroom. How much of it what he'd said was a show, an act, designed to finally drive Michael fucking insane. But the way his voice had _cracked_ …

Michael suddenly felt so tired. He released his iron grip on the back of Trevor's neck and let his hand just rest there, his fingers slipping slightly in the sweat. He slowed his strokes on Trevor's cock, softened them slightly, drew them out. His dick was still mostly flaccid from before, but that didn't stop him from rolling his own hips up to push against Trevor in a simulation, a promise of sex. He remembered back to sitting in the stall, hearing Trevor come closer and closer to the release he needed, his own body straining and trembling with sympathetic desire.

"Come on, baby," he said in a low voice, the word rusty on his tongue. "Come on T, come for me." He was almost muttering now, forcing words out to keep his mouth busy, keep it away from Trevor's. "Come on baby, you've been waiting so long, I'm here now, I'm gonna make it right. Come on T, come for me. I'm right here."

  
*  


In the fantasy, they were running.

So many times, in Trevor's mind, his vision returned to the time when it had been just the two of them. They were at full flight, plunging knee-deep through thick, powdery snow and into a vast and empty field. Snow fell in fat clumps, and the world around them was blanketed under a thick hush. The only sound in the white expanse was the soft sloosh of shifting ice, and the heavy winded gulps of their own ragged breathing.

Michael's buzzcut swept left and right as he scanned the horizon, a bulky orange duffel bag bouncing off the strong curve of his spine. Michael planned. He schemed a route for them and barreled through, with the confident tenacity of a charging rhino. Trevor was the one who would turn around. The one to look behind, yellow eyes always hungry for the trailing threat. That was the way it worked. Michael was the thinker. Trevor ripped out the throats Michael pointed at.

They protected each other... even _loved_ each other, in their own way. It was a broken thought now, but it was just that they had... _really_... been _brothers_. The position was one Trevor had wholly embraced. He had taken it on with consuming, blinding trust. Michael, he could _believe in_. Michael would _never leave him_ , like so many others had come and gone. Michael _understood_. Trevor had once been secure in the knowledge that Michael would always be there for him. Michael would protect him. And the utmost pinnacle of their bond of friendship, Michael would _never_ hurt him.

If only it could have gone on snowing forever.

" _You don't FUCK other people in a room with me, Trevor._ "

The hands that grabbed the Canadian simultaneously at his neck and cock were vicious. Trevor snarled instinctively, his pupils blown out from an ungodly combination of lust, adrenaline, drugs, and the dark of the alley. Michael continued to lecture, punctuating his own stiff words with jerks on Trevor's already bruised cock, and the sensation was almost too much to handle. Trevor's hands slammed down on Michael's shoulders and balled the cheap t-shirt his fingers found there. Michael wanted to argue? Fine, at least his fucking hand was on Trevor's cock. For ONCE... in _ten thousand years_.

" _...you don't fuck somebody else's mouth and say MY fucking name. You hear me?_ "

What the fuck was he talking about? MICHAEL had been the one hiding in the crapper. HE had been the one who had run away from Trevor and his erection like some terrified virginal prude. So FUCKING typical of him to put the blame on someone else. Trevor groaned a low rumble at Michael's ministrations and pushed hard up into the other man's fist, starting to fuck his hand in earnest, using Michael's shoulders as leverage. He fucked his friend's grip into his chest to combat the roughness he was being given, and a dark cloud passed over his face. Michael's throat was there. Between his balled fists, Michael Townley's- _no_ , Michael _De Santa's_ flabby jugular was exposed, as they glared propane torches of accusation at one another from above and below. _Fuck_. All it would take would be to grab him. To wrap his blood-crusted hands around Michael's throat and squeeze as he rutted himself out against the thrashing body beneath him. He could squeeze the life out of Michael like he would squeeze the cum out from his own body. Like he would fucking SQUEEZE the ghost of Michael Townley out of his FUCKING _memory_. Trevor's fingers twitched perceptibly, and he ran his right index finger with surprising gentleness across the fleshy lump of Michael's adam's apple, until another vicious yank on his hard-on had him groaning again instead.

" _Typical_." Trevor breathed raggedly, taking odd note of the hand gentling at the nape of his neck. "Michael ' _center-of-the-fucking-universe'_ Townley. YOU left ME, remember, cupcake? I seriously doubt your intention here is to take me as your blushing bride either so why don't you just- _auhhhhn_!"

The last sound strangled itself out of the pilot like the cry of a wounded puppy.

Michael's hand had stopped it's savage attack and had instead resorted to the kind of sultry full-dick squeeze that made the criminal feel instantly like his balls would explode like rotten fruit. Especially in contrast to the rough, dry jerks of moments before. The rest of his complaints were choked back as his body loudly and violently took over. His teeth clenched and and his forehead bent over to touch the other man's. For a full thirty seconds he couldn't do anything other than tremble in silent meekness beneath Michael's measured caresses. (A skill no doubt learned via countless years of repressing his sexuality by furiously pulling his own pud in a locked bathroom. It had taken him fucking long enough to get to this point.)

" _Come on, baby. Come on, T. Come for me._ "

" _Fuck you,_ Michael." Trevor snarled, even as a look of profound vulnerability flashed across his face. _Baby_..? Baby. He turned his head to the side in an attempt to mask how winded he was by the hitherto unused term of affection. What was this? Was Michael trying to be... _nice_? It didn't seem real, and Trevor's head spun with a confusing concoction of emotions. Fear, desire, anger, and hunger swirled in a terrifying miasma, but when Michael continued to whisper gentle words somewhere by Trevor's left ear, his body made an executive decision and took master control again.

Mikey. Precious Michael, alive and well. His voice, his smell, his hands. _"Come on baby, you've been waiting so long, I'm here now, I'm gonna make it right. Come on, T, come for me. I'm right here."_

" _Fuck, Mikey...you old fucking man... Fuck-!_ " The pilot gritted through clenched teeth, and threw himself back to spread his arms on either side of the dashboard behind them, spine digging into the glove compartment as he ground down into Michael's lap. He twisted a leg up and threw it over Michael's shoulder to allow him better access, and then miraculously focused _completely_ on _one thing_.

_He felt one thing._

_He cared about one thing._

And for once in the unthinkably complicated screaming rabble of his daily thoughts, no other horrors interfered with the experience.

Michael's hips rolled up into him in a parody so close to suggesting the unthinkable that the mere idea of it was the last straw. Trevor's hips bucked up in a final horrendous jerk, and at long, long, (long, long, long, LONG fucking last,) he shot his load in three thick ropes across Michael's Binco button-down, one last strangled groan tumbling off his cracked lips.

After cumming, Trevor remained inert. At some point in their rutting, his shirt had been shoved halfway up his chest to mirror his shorts, and he stared now from the dashboard, drenched in sweat, open-mouthed and panting heavily, over his rumpled clothes to Michael with an odd, disbelieving look. A look wholly un-Trevor-like in it's bizarre openness. He stared Michael down like he had never truly seen him before, and in some ways, it echoed that same reverent awe from just after escaping the strip club. It was a look of shock, a look of vulnerability, surprise, and even a little nervous fear. It dragged out for some time, but at last a familiar bite of Trevor's usual self returned. He pointedly quirked one thick eyebrow at De Santa's chubby, which was at half-mast and making a tiny tent in the front of his dad shorts. The look was a reproach just as much as it was a rekindling of the heat between them, a promise of a desire to repeat what they had just done, again and again and again.

_Don't lie about not wanting this._

  
*  


Michael felt some of his own tension slither out of him as Trevor came. His body had been in _distress_ , somehow, since the bathroom—picking up on Trevor's blue-ball syndrome and aching in sympathy. Trevor had always been a perennially horny bastard, and Michael had endured what seemed like hundreds of car rides and motel rooms without being affected by Trevor's constant hard-ons. He wondered vaguely what was different about now, before deciding he didn't want to know the answer.

He pooled back against the car seat and rested his head against Trevor's ankle while he caught his breath. He felt really fucking good, for the first time in, well, for a long time. When he opened his eyes to grin conspiratorially at Trevor, however, he was stopped by the unexpected look on his face. It was a look of vulnerability, a child-like look. It was a look that clawed at something in him, something he'd left to die in a midwestern trailer park. It was a look that sounded like Trevor's voice calling to him in a snowstorm, reassuring him he wouldn't leave.

Michael quickly averted his eyes, cast them around for something, _anything_ , other than Trevor's gaze and any dialogue or introspection it might invite. He lit upon the car beside them, took note of the make and model, catalogued a few scratches, mentally priced it out. Meanwhile his fingers played nervously across the fabric of Trevor's shorts, stretched low across his thighs. He absently rolled it between his thumb and forefinger while he guessed and calculated, his thumbnail brushing against the inner thigh.

When Michael flicked his gaze back to Trevor's face, he could tell the moment had safely passed. Gone was the blown-apart look from before (Mother of God, what had he _said_ when he was babbling through Trevor's orgasm? Oh Christ, had he told him he was _beautiful?_ ); it had been replaced with a familiar smirk, a challenge from the most challenge-ing person Michael had the misfortune to know. He followed Trevor's quirked eyebrow down to his own crotch, where… well, fuck.

He honestly hadn't even realized he was hard again. He had absolutely no right to be. His legs were starting to fall asleep. He was covered in sweat, blood, and now cum. Forty-five minutes ago he'd had a ball-clenching, knuckle-biting orgasm (literally—bite marks were still lightly visible on the back of his hand… a litany of self-hating, homophobic insults went through his mind every time he remembered this) in a strip club bathroom. He was on the far side of his mid-forties, for fuck's sake. He hadn't taken any magic dick pills recently (that he was aware of—he didn't put that past Trevor _at all_ ).

And yet, _and yet_ , he could feel it start to swell further under Trevor's attention. He tried to glare at Trevor, but found his eyes slipping down to skate over Trevor's stomach where his shirt was hiked up (god, when had he gotten so _debauched?_ ), the tattoos there, the old scars he recognized and the new ones he did not. They filled him with a strange anger, the new scars, and a vague feeling of shame. Where had he been when Trevor had gotten those scars? Was he watching TV? Eating dinner with his family, laughing? Jerking off, maybe thinking about the body before him, while that body was being chipped away?

Yeah, he'd jerked off thinking about Trevor a few times. Alright more than a few. It had actually been happening more and more recently, right up to the point when he'd discovered Trevor was still alive—like a lonely, horny harbinger, he'd summoned Trevor back into his life by sheer force of wank. And now Trevor was here, straddling him, lounging on his body and his car for all the world to see like a pinup in Dirty Meth-Head Magazine. And god help him it turned him on, against science and reason. Could Trevor have gotten more attractive in the last decade? No, of course not. He was ten years and ten thousand meth hits older. Maybe it was just that a hole in Michael had gotten ten years wider since he'd seen him last. A disturbingly Trevor-shaped hole.

Michael suddenly realized that during his jerk-off musings he had been softly rolling his hips into Trevor, one hand gripping Trevor's thigh while the other rested on his waist, his thumb pressing into his belly. He shot an embarrassed look back at Trevor, but didn't have the energy to fight anymore. What was the use of arguing the semantics of desire and repulsion, love and hate, when pinned beneath the body that his body would betray him for?

So instead he hauled Trevor back up off the dash and to his chest, trapping his twitching, cum-beaded dick between their stomachs. He buried his face in Trevor's chest hair and inhaled, his thick arms wrapped around Trevor's waist, securing him while he ground up against him. It was still dry-humping on his part, which was truthfully probably the best he could manage in this cramped position anyway, but it did the trick— _especially_ when his hand dipped down to the curve of Trevor's ass, gripped the flesh there, kneaded it from the top as his hips pushed from the bottom. It was the most he'd ever touched of Trevor's body at once, he suddenly realized, and it was _glorious_.

He felt drunk from lust and exhaustion, and was about to suggest that they find someplace more horizontal when he noticed colored lights playing on Trevor's shoulder. Red and blue. The cops.

"You've gotta be fucking with me," he said, his hips still grinding upward.

  
*  


For a few long moments, Trevor allowed himself to be tightly squeezed as he knelt over Michael's warm lap. His arms hovered hesitantly above their heads, as if not quite sure where to settle them in the bizarre limbo of comfort and affection coming unexpectedly from Townley. When the man below him pushed his nose into the bloody chest hair he found at face level, Trevor fumbled momentarily with the back of Michael's hair, fingers wracking in a stiff circle, then questing down to pat his shoulders, fingers touching with uncharacteristic hesitance, stained with dirt, blood, paint, and god only knew what else.

"...Mikey..." His voice crackled like dry paper, thirsty, devoid of tone.

How many years... _how many fucking years_... had he dreamed of something like this? Wishing that his dead friend had touched him just once, with even the tiniest measure of love? Something more than a firm clap on the shoulder? A casual tug on his coat sleeve, a sarcastic poke to his temple? It had been part of the Michael mystique... He had always been untouchable. Oh, sure, a handjob under a pinewood table was acceptable for fucking selfish Michael Townley to satisfy his own self-absorbed desires. Trevor would allow himself to occasionally be pushed down on his knees in a filthy, freezing diner restroom at 3am, but at the end of the night Trevor would get a pass and Michael went home in the snow alone. Or even fucking worse, a little later on, home to _Amanda_. Amanda and a trailer full of _children_. A particularly powerful swell of bad memories came on, triggered by the strange sensation of Michael's arms around him. The pilot swallowed back a momentary impulse to puke, and his leathery hands instead reached around to grab the back of Michael's headrest, boxing Michael's skull in between his strong forearms. He clawed at it with the same intensity that he clutched a steering wheel while slamming his foot down on the gas, then cast a panicked look at the top of his best friend's head, childlike and lost in the intensity of the moment... Trevor swallowed once, then twice, at the feeling of the other man's thick arms pulling him heavily down, circling them closer into each other.

What had happened over the last nine years? Frightening and confusing emotions played Trevor back and forth like a fiddle. They didn't touch each other like this. This wasn't part of their arrangement.

It wasn't a part of _the rules._

The Canadian dropped his chin to watch Michael rub his face into his patchy chest, noting with a sharp pinch to his balls that their sweat mingling had reinvigorated the scent of blood. Michael's cheeks were darker than usual as the now earless bouncer's drying fluids dirtied the flesh between them, staining Michael just a little with red. When his hands slid around to grab Trevor's ass with pointed firmness, Trevor's anxiety transformed with a hard rush into an anger. Townley rolled up into him, instantly shattering all safeguards surrounding Rule Number Three, and the pilot's hands dropped from the headrest and back down onto the Binco-clad shoulders there. He ground down on the reviving hard-on beneath him, his own slimy cock making a slurry out of the mess of cum already striping Michael's clothed stomach. Fantasy raged hard in his mind again, though this time the visions were much more grandiose in scope and intention. He wanted more of whatever this was, even as his eyes blazed with fury and hurt, and his rough hand shoved itself down between them to ruck up underneath Townley's cheap shirts to trace a hot, cummy track across his perfect belly.

"...you self-aggrandizing _fuck_!" Trevor grit thickly through clenched teeth, in a tone that was detectably unstable. "You fat piece of shit, you're _fifteen fucking years AND_ a funeral AND a resurrection _too late_ for this!"

His words and his actions were in direct contrast with each other as the criminal's hand slid up to squeeze Michael's right tit, pinching it hard once, then again with more of a vicious twist. He changed tactics as quickly as any number of his other mood swings, and suddenly his cum-stained fingers were pushing into Michael's mouth to slide across his tongue, then into his own mouth for the taste of his own cum and Michael's spit together, then both hands were stuffed down between them at Michael's shorts, fumbling to pop the top button.

"You think I'll just bend over backwards for you, Townley? _Again_? Eh? I don't need your _help_ anymore, _Michael_." His name spilled out like venom, ever an accusation. "YOU help ME now. I'm _fine_ now. I have BETTER FRIENDS NOW. _And_ Patricia, _remember?_? She thinks I'm MATURE. You don't need to _take care_ of me. I don't need your _coddling_ OR your _sympathy,_ _vous connard égoïste._ "

Trevor thrust a few fingers past Michael's boxers to tickle the coarse hair there, his face growing hungrier and darker by the minute as old wounds resonated loudly in his chaotic recollections. He wanted Michael to break Rule Number Three, remembered all the times he'd fucked (and sometimes killed) homeless drifters with Michael's name on his lips. Blood and cum intermingled intoxicatingly on his palette. He NEEDED to find out what had been withheld between them for so many years. Anger rolled off his trembling body like he could feel his own breath rolling off Townley and back into his face, thick with the scent of stale beer. Michael had _betrayed_ him. Michael _owed_ him this.

"...I wouldn't let you try anyway, since you'd only _knife_ me in my god damn back! ...AGAIN, Michael. Like you did to _Brad_ , like you did to your _wife_ , like you did to _me..._ again and again! You're an insufferable, RETIRED old man who NEVER got over your former career. DON'T use me to relive your glory days!"

Trevor Philips would NOT be bought off with such a dirty bribe as this lofty... _withholder_... was offering. Promising him a good fuck? Was it a cruel joke? The pilot's intentions flashed back and forth in a decidedly insane rotation, settling on a different point with every new gasp, every sharp feeling.

Did Michael think that a little kindness could erase all the wrongs which had permanently stained their friendship? Their BROTHERHOOD? Was Trevor Philips, BUSINESSMAN, really that transparent? Who did Michael think Trevor even was, anymore? Did Michael think that he was still that snowy lost dog from back in North Yankton? Or was he still the skinny, smelly kid puking on the side of the highway? That same worshipful orange scrub from years ago without a good idea in his head? The one wiping sweat away with a thin wrist and a longing look? Or was he the violent, lonely kid who had needed to be controlled, needed so much help, needed so much direction, like a packless wild animal hungers for a leader?

When had he ever NEEDED Michael Townley? _Really_? It was an indignant thought. When had he needed Michael to protect him from himself, and from the things he was perpetually afraid of doing (and now _did, constantly,_ ) to others? Anger pumped hard with arousal, along with the last vestiges of the uppers he had blown at the strip club.

Was this whole night nothing more than the act of an indulgent older brother reigning in a difficult child? Is that why he was doing this? Did he think that without a tether, Trevor had _lost his mind_?

The Canadian roughly shoved a thumb back into Michael's mouth, hooking his blood-stained cheek and pulling his jaw down as he considered simply ripping the soft flesh in half. He was leaning in dangerously close to breaking Rule Number One when distant sirens froze him in his tracks. His face hardened inches away from Michael's lips, unmoving.

  
*  


Things were taking a turn.

As Trevor's dull mask of a face loomed in close, backlit by flashing red and blue, Michael felt the pit of his stomach drop out in fear. Despite his thief brain screaming at him to move, get out of the car, the cops were coming, he found he couldn't rip his eyes from Trevor's. His jaw ached with the strain of being pulled down, the corner of his mouth stinging with pain from the over-stretching of thin, dry skin. He ran his tongue nervously over the rough thumb crooked behind his molars, and struggled with the rabbit urge to bite down on it hard before running for cover into the nearest hole. But it was that same rabbit brain that was caught, hypnotized under the eyes of the snake.

A clarity that he hadn't had since escaping the strip club—no, since Trevor had prowled into his house weeks ago—was returning to him, setting the scene in blinding detail.

Now he remembered why it was he'd made those fucking rules.

It wasn't some sentimental effort to retain the illusion of heterosexuality, or his chance at a happy marriage. It wasn't some effort to not "fall in love"—it wasn't even an attempt to keep good _hygiene_ , though any of those reasons would be enough. No. Not fucking Trevor Phillips was the simple matter of not letting him close enough to rip him apart with his bare hands, which he clearly was about to do now.

Trevor wasn't a normal man, then or now. He wasn't a poker buddy, or a teammate in the locker room who was good for a friendly fuck now and then but not someone to take home to your parents. Trevor was a wild animal, a wounded one for sure, but still wild and completely unpredictable. Sure he might kill your enemies, but at the end of the day he could and would turn around and kill you too for reasons you'd _never_ be capable of understanding.

Blind fear flooded every synapse in his brain. He knew it was all over his face, was terrified of what that might mean but even more terrified of what would happen when Trevor's _teeth_ got closer to his neck. His eyes still locked with Trevor's, his fingers quietly found the door handle. The cops were out there and getting closer, but as much as the wolves scared him, it didn't matter one flying fuck because _the lion was already in the house_.

Trevor's face leaned in closer, and as their noses touched Michael popped open the door. His hands clutching around the back of Trevor's head and thigh, he rolled them both out of the car seat and onto the dusty alleyway. Trevor went down beneath Michael, and the air rushed out of him as his back hit the pavement. He wasn't ready for it, but Michael was, and he was up on his feet almost immediately.

"Split up, they're looking for two," he grunted in what he meant to sound like an order, but came out as an explanation, almost an apology. "I'll see you back home." With that he turned and jogged out of the alley, towards the sirens and the lights. As soon as he turned the corner he broke into a run.

—

At two o'clock in the morning, Michael pedaled wobblingly up Trevor's drive.

When he'd left Trevor, he had distracted the cops into chasing him a few blocks away. As chicken-shit scared as he was, and against what he knew, Trevor had looked strangely vulnerable there with his pink shorts around his knees in that dead-end alley. The cops had pursued him into a gas station, where he'd given them the slip out the back and stolen the owner's car. A few cars and a bicycle later, he'd finally felt it was safe enough to rendezvous. After a quick stop in at a truck stop bar, of course. For courage.

After buying a quick shower with crumpled bills from the dashboard of a stolen Karin Rebel, he'd taken the first pro indifferent enough to his blood-covered clothes around back of the bar and fucked her into the brick wall. As he pushed into her from behind, he examined the back of his hand where it was bracing the wall. His knuckles were just starting to scab over from when they'd scraped the asphalt, protecting the back of Trevor's head from impact. She was the first strange pussy he'd had since Amanda had caught him with the stripper, and he didn't feel that great about it. But there was nothing to be done, he told himself grimly as he stared down his raw knuckles, the dry sounds of their bodies moving together mingled with her practiced moans.

Ten minutes later he still hadn't cum, but was tired and embarrassed so he just faked it, shuddering his hips against her and emitting a pleasureless groan. He wondered if she could tell the difference, but decided she probably didn't care—was just glad to be done either way. He gave her thirty bucks and bought her a drink in the bar, and had a couple himself. He considered just staying there—renting a bed, hiding out until this thing with Martin Madrazo blew over. But when the time came, he put his money on the bar and headed out into the parking lot. The car he'd stolen wasn't there any more (really, stealing from the stealer?) and every other gas-powered vehicle in his blurry sight was an eighteen-wheeler, so he hopped on a nearby bicycle and pedaled it the rest of the way home.

Now, he ditched the bike in Ron's bushes and took stock. His foot _still_ didn't have a fucking shoe, and his sock was filled with drying blood from his sprints across asphalt, gravel and broken glass. At least his pants were buttoned up now—it had been an embarrassing number of hours into his getaway before he'd caught that gem. Suddenly he remembered Trevor's fingers in his pubic hair, his body rutting against him in lust and anger. He remembered words tumbling from his mouth, unintelligible words, _French words_ , as he prodded and squeezed. He remembered his face looming in the darkness.

He swallowed thickly and limped towards the trailer.

TBC IN PART 2…..


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Michael and Trevor consummate... violently.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Caution to all readers that this chapter gets SUPER EXPLICIT. if graphic depictions of sex with people both alive and dead are a problem for you stop right now because if there was a bar before, we sink ten feet below it. 
> 
> This chapter also contains a little good old canadian french. those lines can be translated in order as 1) "hurry up!" 2) "why didn't you fuck me when we were kids?" and 3) "I've loved you my whole life! Liar! You betrayed me!" 
> 
> enjoy this smut you shiesty trikey lovers

The door to Trevor's trailer hung open on one broken hinge.

Below the handle, the rest of the door hung in a snarl of kicked-out screen and bent metal, completely torn out of the frame and shuddering in the night wind on one last screaming bit of aluminum. Bloody knuckle prints marred the upper half of the door, accented by a few half-dried fat splats of red directly below on the ground of the threshold. As if a tornado had blown through the front door and destroyed everything it touched, the inside wasn't much better off.

The couch Michael had been sleeping on was overturned, and articles of his single packed bag were strewn across the floor. The bag itself had been ripped open hard enough to break the zipper. It hung from the neon sign close to the ceiling. The gun which had been in the bag was missing, as well as the knives from the block on the counter. It looked like bottles of Pisswaser had been consecutively shattered on the floor by the island. Sprinkled on top of the broken wreckage were bits of ripped up paper. They were letters, upon closer inspection. Letters written on ruled paper in a thick ballpoint pen. Words like _'penitentiary'_ , ' _commissary_ ' and _'Brad'_ were barely legible as the paper soaked.

A single tooth sat on the counter next to the faucet. The sink was full of bloody water.

As Michael pushed the noisy door out of the way and stepped back out onto the porch, the sound of a double barreled shotgun cocking cracked through the night.

"Oh," Ron lowered the weapon after a beat, somewhat reluctantly, from his position in the yard a few feet away. "It's you."

Trevor's neurotic assistant was still wearing the gaudy Hawaiian shirt Michael had gifted him the previous night, though now it was spattered with a fine mist of blood. His tan cargo shorts sported a larger red stain, though it appeared not to be from any injury of his own. Behind him, Patricia cracked open the door to Ron's trailer and cautiously exited out into the yard. Below the sound of the desert wind, a faint moaning cry could be heard coming from inside Ron's house.

"What the hell did you do?" Ron's question was sharp and accusatory, despite his lack of background information. Assumption was plain on his short, wrinkled face. Trevor Good. Michael Bad. "I hope you're prepared to pay Wade's medical bills! You're bad news, Mr. De Santa, I'm sorry but I just don't think you're any good for Trevor in his delicate state of mind right now, especially judging by his behavior tonight. He's... not _normal_!"

The irony of that statement seemed to fly right over Ron's head.

Just as Patricia's quiet pink silhouette came up behind Ron, he shot out an agitated hand to click on the pocket radio clipped to his belt. The static signal of a news report screamed into the thick night air.

_"-to you, on the scene!"_

"Yes, thanks Lorraine, I'm here with an areal view of the pursuit now! The vehicle appears to be off-roading intermittently between highway lanes as it circles around the Alamo Sea, and, what's that? Yes? YES, It is now CONFIRMED that the driver has two hostages, both from Vespucci Beach where this evening's chase got it's start. Around 10:30pm, the perpetrator allegedly drove his red Bodhi M715 up Del Perro Pier, mowing down civilians and policemen alike. The evening escalated when he pulled a sex worker off a nearby corner and into his car, and then several minutes later, a police officer as well. The officer's name has been confirmed to be deputy Harold Zamona, the woman's identity as of yet still unidentified. No known motivation for these crimes has been pinpointed. Police pursuing are apparently having some difficulty closing the distance as the driver appears to be lobbing grenades, as well as road flares over his shoulder as he drives! What a guy, huh? I wouldn't want that fella to be MY driving instructor! Heh, Diane, back to you!"

"Thanks Chuck, we'll be keeping close tabs on this story as it progresses. Police are in pursuit both on land and by air, so with any luck the criminal should be brought to justice within the hour. Let's salute our boys in blue for keeping us safe through the dangerou-"

Ron clicked the radio off and stared at Michael with baseless, thick accusation.

The quiet touch of Patricia's hand on his shoulder caused him to move aside, and she stepped into Michael's space. Her hand went then to touch Michael's shoulder as well, as she smiled up at him in a calm, motherly fashion.

"Did you have a fight?" the question was airy and careless, as well as completely nonjudgmental. "Trevor, he.." she nodded in thought, "He is a... sensitive boy... no, a sensitive _man_. You know this?"

The hand left Michael's shoulder and Patricia retrieved something from her sweatpants pocket. She brushed her fingertips over a small stack of photos. She touched them reverently, as if she had rescued them from a fire, or possibly something worse. Then, after a quiet moment of contemplation, handed them over to Michael.

They were old photos from North Yankton. Michael, standing in front of his trailer with a broad grin, his arm hooked around the neck of a pregnant and hopeful Amanda. Trevor sitting on the toilet with his pants down, flicking off the camera. Michael and Trevor sitting on the carcass of a buck, Trevor grasping the antlers proudly. Michael, Trevor and Brad standing in a snowy field by the propeller of a beaten Hercules C-130, each with their foot on an open crate of guns. A picture of Tracy on her first birthday.

"If you fight, you should have a make-up..!" Patricia nodded wisely, smoothing the photos into Michael's hand. "He is lonely, I think. He needs love, and your guidance! He is like this desert, do you understand?"

Over Patricia's shoulder, Ron made a confused face like he had just smelled a fart. He glanced back and forth as he worked the analogy over in his own mind, clearly not understanding. He gave up a minute later, and returned to leveling Michael with thick mistrust as he clutched his shotgun.

Michael stared at the photos in his hands and his blood began to boil. Looking at his own young, stupid face, without a clue or worse, a care. At the look on Trevor's face, that beaming, trusting look. Why the fuck did Trevor have to worship him so much back then? Michael was just another smug, stupid asshole, a piss-pot Judas. Of course, of _course_ these photos had been saved, when all other evidence of Michael's current existence had been destroyed by Hurricane Psycho. Trevor's monument to a long-lost time, a _better time_ , remembered through sepia photos and the rosy tint of a meth-addled brain. What an _idiot._ What a _fool._ His face contorted with hatred, and his fingers twitched as if to crumple the photographs that Mrs. Madrazo had so lovingly pressed into his fat, meaty hands.

But then, there was Tracy. Trevor had a photo of Tracy. It was pristine, better probably than any he had at his own house, but its edges were worn with handling. Something in him cracked, and he gave the tiniest, barely audible whimper.

_Trevor._

He relaxed his hand, his expression collapsing into weariness.

"Do me a favor, will you, Mrs. Madrazo? Hold onto these for a while," he said, and pushed them back into her hands.

She took them and nodded sagely before turning and shuffling in the direction of Ron's trailer. Ron glanced between the two of them with a kind of bewildered look on his face before settling back on Michael.

"Fuck off, Ron," Michael sighed, and entered the trailer without a backward glance. Something in Ron almost relaxed at the familiar feeling of being ordered to do something, and with one last mixed look of fear and disapproval he slunk off after Mrs. Madrazo.

Michael ignored the living room carnage and went straight for Trevor's bedroom, which was relatively untouched. Probably, he thought, because he'd never been in there; there wasn't any evidence to destroy.

Suddenly he was bone-tired. He swept the various drug and murder paraphernalia off of the naked mattress with his forearm before collapsing onto his side, fully dressed, kicking his one remaining shoe off at the last second. He dragged the ragged blanket over his shoulder and tried to sleep. But through his body's exhaustion his mind plowed on, oblivious.

He thought he could almost hear sirens mingled with the wind and the sound of Wade's moans, though he knew that was just his imagination—Trevor's adventures were much too far away at this point. He imagined Trevor, shark-toothed Trevor, his bloody hands clutching the steering wheel. He clenched his own fists in response, felt his blunt, dirty nails dig into his palms.

He knew, even through his seemingly fathomless capacity for self-deception, that this was something he had caused, and he felt a deep responsibility to stop it. But what could he do? Sky-write "I FUCKED UP" using one of Trevor's illegal airplanes? Hijack a car, beat the cops in a high-speed chase, pull up beside Trevor and scream apologies into the driver-side window? No, Trevor was on a tear and he would have to ride it out. At least, that's what he told himself.

Tomorrow, he would handle the trailer. Tomorrow, he would figure out what to do. He'd come up with something—he always did. But tonight, he buried his nose into Trevor's pillow and inhaled, and fell asleep to the ghost sounds of sirens.

24 hours later, Michael woke to the sound of the shower running.

  
*  


One of the more terrifying aspects of being Trevor Philips, especially as of recently, was his tendency to drop in on himself in the middle of some activity with literally zero awareness of how he had gotten there, or indeed how much time had passed until then. Each one of these episodes came on, no doubt, with the help of the truly staggering volume of narcotics he consumed on a daily basis. That wasn't up for debate. But a laundry list of misdiagnoses and other confusing disorders yammered around in his head as well, the harping voice of his mother a constant presence in an otherwise horrendous tornado of pain and fear. _Intermittent Explosive Disorder. Reactive Attachment Disorder. Cyclothymia. Ganser Syndrome._ He couldn't spell all the problems he had, much less say them out loud. She had always told him it would come to this, one day. That he was human garbage. She was right. She had been right about a lot of things. In the end, she had said there was nothing he could do about himself, about being fundamentally _wrong_ , in _every_ conceivable way. He didn't try.

The fact that he had stopped trying to protect himself showed in every aspect of his life. Trevor had been lucky last time, waking up on the roof of his own trailer in little more than a stained dress. Sometimes he came-to slumped down by a dumpster, sometimes buried beneath wet piles of trash bags, sometimes surrounded by unfamiliar bloodstains with strange keys in his pocket. (Lucky instances.) And sometimes, if he was _very, very_ lucky, he even dropped in on himself curled up in the flatbed of his Bodhi, under a greasy wool blanket and a starry desert sky.

This was not one of those times.

Like sliding out of a dream, Trevor became conscious of cold wet flesh beneath his tightly clenched fingers. Then came the distinct aroma of evacuated bowels that he was unfortunately all too familiar with. He was thrusting hard into the stiff corpse of a woman on the pebbly shore of the Zancudo river, her hardening limbs bent up doggy-style as her bloody face scraped lifelessly into an inch of shallow water. Trevor's first inclination was to scream, but as his hips continued their frantic quest, the slimy interior of her heavy body wrung an unholy pleasure out of him. When his mouth opened, it was to release a pained, guttural groan, and he shot his molten load with a terrible jerk of his hips into the dead hole. The pleasure was horrifying and consuming, and he bent over her back to clutch at her sopping hair. Then roving his bloody hands out, he touched every part of her waxy flesh that he could reach, petting, cajoling, almost pleading for a return to warmth when he knew there could be none. All that met his pleas were cold, broken bones and the cloying stink of death. For long moments he rode out the aftershocks of his orgasm, his cock twitching mercilessly, then, riddled with self-loathing and fear, his intermittent groans grew into a hoarse cry for help on the otherwise isolated riverbank. He wailed like that for a while, the rough skin of his forehead pressed against her sharp spine.

By the time Trevor found his truck, parked several meters away from the waterfront, he had begun to recollect a patchwork of flashes from the night before. The corpse of a police officer laid in the bed of the Bodhi, under the greasy wool blanket he loved. Closer inspection also revealed a gun, a box of ammunition, and several kitchen cleavers thrown haphazardly into his back seat. At least the Trevor of last night had been prepared for this inevitable outcome. He looked down at the knives, knowing what he had to do. Strangely, after everything, it made him feel settled. Relaxed, even. His course was clear. He knew exactly where to go with absolutely no question. The straightforwardness of it pulled pressure off his thoughts like a radiator releasing steam. It was just a matter of executing his tasks, and delegating his guilt about it to an even deeper, darker place than where he had already been. Like throwing it in the trash, he brushed the murders aside to never consider again.

Time was a funny thing. Trevor knew a certain amount of it must have passed, _knew_ he must have been gone for _hours_ , but as he drove in his freshly emptied truck down the highway, feeling the breeze wick away his sweat, it seemed like time didn't exist at all. When he was alone, time had a frightening way of losing meaning. Days ran together into an indistinguishable blur of violence and sex and torment and release. Without someone heading his course, he swam in listless circles like a shark separated from it's mate. It was kill or be killed. He turned the radio up until it was deafening.

When Trevor pulled back into the covered garage by his trailer, memories of the things he had done, the places he had just been, were already receding like a tide back into the distant recesses of his mind. Only the taste of human corpse lingered now, clinging to his palette just above the flavors of smoke and blood. It was the last thing between him and shedding the event entirely, shrugging off the horror like a snake shrugs out of it's skin.

Trevor trudged through the chaos of his trailer, unseeing. He didn't shower on the regular, but a glance at his face in the mirror, half splattered with blood and looking like hell, paired with the corpse aroma on his tongue, was enough to drive him to the deed with little thought. He turned the water on as hot as it would go, peeled his bloody, cum-crusted clothes off to pool on the floor, and rolled his tired body under the stream.

 _Intermittent Explosive Disorder. Reactive Attachment Disorder. Cyclothymia. Ganser Syndrome._ Trevor stuck the bar of soap in his mouth, and bit down on the waxy white flesh.

The sight of Michael's sleeping figure in his bed stopped him cold. Trevor stared, his towel slung over his shoulders as he stood naked and dripping by his closet door. Michael... Michael. _Michael_. Memories flashed, of Michael's face close to his own. He had forgotten until now, focused so closely on his own horrors, and the tasks they had brought on. But there he was, still in the same, bloody, cum-crusted clothing of the previous night. More memories. Michael's thick fingers wrapped around Trevor's hard, heavy cock. The feel of Michael's erection grinding up the cleft of Trevor's ass. And then the sensation of hitting the pavement, hard. That had been the motivation, he remembered. His anguish. His fury. The betrayal.

A trigger.

For long moments, Trevor let the idea of Townley's presence churn around, before the familiar bite of anger rushed up in a sudden burst. With a sudden angry jerk, he punched the door once, his knuckles making loud, violent contact.

He didn't want to give Michael any warning. He wanted to rip Michael's crusty dad shorts away from his thick, hairy thighs. His presence here was unconscionable.

No, it was worse than that. _It was inhumane._

"Get up, you fat fucking snake. Wake up!" The Canadian took a heavy step forward onto the mattress, until he stood, still gloriously naked, with a foot planted on either side of Michael's prostrate torso.

  
*  


The sound of the shower running drifted in and out of his consciousness like intermittent rain over a midwestern trailer park. He sighed deeply, contentedly, and in his dream saw the water running over Amanda's smooth, pink skin. She was pregnant with Tracey. The water ran over the bulge of her stomach, some dripping off from her bellybutton, some running in rivulets back down into the dark nest of hair beneath. Michael's balls tightened as she soaped her swollen breasts, her delicate armpits. If he could just enter that shower, hold her there against the cool tiles...

The crunch and thwack of flesh and bone impacting cheap wood invaded his dream. Amanda had hit her head. There was blood...

_"Get up, you fat fucking snake. Wake up!"_

It was _Trevor._ He'd found them—he, Trevor had done this somehow. The water swirling down the drain was tinted pink.

His world shifted, he was falling. He cried, "Amanda"—

Michael de Santa sat up on his elbows, sweat pouring off his body. He was disoriented. The mattress was trembling... he looked up and saw a familiar shadow. A wet shadow.

"Jesus, T, you scared the crap out of me," Michael complained, frustration and disappointment just edging out the actual fear in his voice. He glanced at the clock on the side table, confirmed that it was indeed the middle of the night. To hide his jitters, he fell back on tried-and-true grouchiness.

"Perfect time for a shower, I see. You wash all the blood and guts off yet?"

Something in his brain was telling him this wasn't the time for quips. There was some crucial information he was forgetting. There was something he was supposed to tell Trevor, something _really important_ , but it wasn't coming to mind.

Well, it would come to him.

  
*  


Trevor's nostrils flared in indignant anger when Amanda's name fell off of Michael's sleep-slurring lips. The plot was thickening, apparently. Not only had Michael decided it was a good idea to sleep in Trevor's bed after everything that had happened, but he then had the... _audacity_... to have a dream about his wife while he was here. The Canadian loomed dangerously over the other man, drops of water dribbling down his leg hair, through his chest hair, down his back. Drops fell off the tip of his nose, hitting Townley in the face. In that moment, Michael looked more like an enormous snack and less like a human than he possibly ever had before. It was almost funny, considering the corpse taste Trevor had just washed out of his mouth. It _would have_ been funny, if he could only figure out how to stop feeling so insulted.

"Hmmmmm, looking _comfortable_ , _Michael_!" The pilot shifted weight from foot to foot as he hummed the words in a suspiciously polite tone. "Looking... hmmhhhm... _spacious_! I see you've found Patricia's side of the bed. And, uh, _my_ side of the bed. Both sides!"

The fat fuck was in the direct center of the mattress. Trevor licked his lips, racking his eyes up and down Michael's sluggish figure. He seemed a little worse for wear, even on top of the dried cum, blood, dust, and probably alcohol soaked into his filthy Binco summer garb. The look suited him. Trevor briefly fantasized about the moment when he would get to rip Michael'l bloodstained shirt from his meaty body. ...And then _possibly_ use it as a gag? He was sick of Michael's shit. His pretentious, self-involved, cowardly, dubious, malignant, and overall _disgusting_ ...Amanda- _fantasizing_... bullshit.

"There's, uh, just... _one_ problem..." Trevor circled his fingers around his limp dick.

"...I... am _not_..." he shook it to accentuate each word, burning a hole into Michael's face with the intensity of his glare.

"...your _fucking wife_!"

  
*  


Michael's face was set in a wide angry grimace even through the water dripping into his eyes, his bottom lip steely as water dribbled over it. He was rested now. (Really, really rested. His head was exceedingly fuzzy even through the sharpness of anger and indignation. Seriously, how long had he been asleep?) And Michael Townley didn't like getting woken up from wet dreams about his beautiful estranged wife, didn't take _shit_ from _dicks_ , up to and including Trevor _fucking_ Philips. Even this Trevor—older, meaner, somehow even fucking crazier—he was still another asshole and he was still Trevor and Michael was still Michael.

"Don't I Fucking Know It," Michael spat, his eyes briefly lingering on the fleshy bulb in Trevor's fingers before training back on Trevor's face. His eyes were broadcasting INSANITY in capital letters, and he had every reason and every right to be shit-pants terrified. The fear still lived somewhere in his body but he wasn't about to give in now, not to someone who _pissed him off so much._

"Believe me I would be glad to sleep on the couch, but someone had a temper tantrum and shredded it last night. So I got to enjoy the _bounty_ of your piss-stained rabid squirrel nest while you went out and had a _terrorist pity party_ with the police."

He pulled at one of Trevor's wiry ankle hairs. "Now move so I can get up. I have a headache and I smell like a dead animal."

  
*  


 _A terrorist pity party_. Trevor's eyes narrowed into dangerous slits.

The humorless chuckle which rolled across Michael's prone body was as good a warning as any. Michael's logic was _so_ _typically_ self-centered that for a moment, it had actually hurt. Michael had shoved him away last night, and run like the coward that he now clearly fucking was. That much was, somehow, _painfully_ expected. But the fact that Townley's twisted troll logic was now attempting to bend the blame back around on Trevor was really the cherry on top of this enormous shit cake. And he was doing it _here_. In _this_ trailer. _In this bed._ It was insult to injury. It was taking a dump on a downed man. It was unacceptable. Michael needed a _fucking spanking_... He needed to be _punished_! For someone as self-concerned as Michael De Santa, he clearly didn't appreciate the high level of danger he was currently lying in the middle of.

"You want me to _move_? _Ohhhhhh, no, no, no._ I don't _think so_ , cupcake. Let me explain a little something to you about, _hmmmmmm_... _commitments_." The soft flesh in Trevor's hand was warming at his touch. With fingers that almost seemed lazy, he began to slowly stroke himself. He loomed over Michael, leaning his hips forward as he watched the other man's face past the pointed action of his hand.

"When you make a _commitment_ , that means you are _obligated_ to follow through. You understand me here, Mikey? I know for someone like, uh... well, like _you_... a _commitment_ is some wishy washy term that, on _several occasions_ , you have actively chosen _not_ to honor. _That's bullshit,_ amigo!"

Raising a knee, Trevor rubbed his foot across Michael's crotch, back and forth. Michael's anger, his frustration, the stench of his hangover mingling with blood and dirt and sweat, rose up off his body and hit Trevor in the face. It tasted nostalgic, exciting, and the criminal's pulse began to race a little faster.

"You're a turd, Michael. You're a piece of shit. You _owe_ me a _fucking explanation_! Tough, sissy, I don't care. _You. Owe. Me._ "

  
*  


"A commitment? So that's what this is about?" Michael barked a laugh, playing dumb. _Of course_ that's what this was about, he knew it, had known it since hearing those inane announcers attempt to describe the meteoric insanity, the resplendent emotional carnage that Trevor was wreaking across Los Santos. He knew it, had known it, but that didn't mean he had to _admit it._

The same way he didn't have to admit how perversely good it felt when Trevor ghosted his foot over the front of Michael's crotch. His dick had gotten twitchy from his dream, and although his current situation was about as far away from the soft pink sterility of making love to his pregnant wife against wet white tiles, it affected him with disturbing similarity (perhaps—and this was secret, unmentionable knowledge, only half-addressed in lonely, late-night masturbatory fantasies—perhaps it affected him even _moreso)._

"Did I not honor our promise ring?" he teased, cruelty in his voice even as he shifted his hips slightly. "Fuck, Trevor, I pulled you off in an alleyway, I didn't exactly ask you to _marry me."_

Even as he said it, his stomach soured. That one had felt almost too close to home. He remembered again that there was something he was supposed to tell him, something dire. He settled for explanation, his voice softening with unacknowledged guilt.

"The cops were on us, I had to think fast. We couldn't exactly fight them off from that... position," Michael said, his eyes flitting across the room with nervous annoyance.

"I mean Jesus, I led them away from you Trevor, you know that right? I was trying to help." He thumbed his wedding ring, tried to rotate it on its finger, but it was crusted in place from dead skin cells and probably dried blood from his knuckles. What he said was true, in a way. With enough denial.

  
*  


Hurt flashed across Trevor's face briefly, before being washed away under an onslaught of anger. He was right, for once. They _weren't_ married. They would never _be_ married. Amanda was waiting, somewhere. Trevor knew without a shadow of a doubt that out of the many, _many_ reasons for their mutual hatred, one reason ruled above all others. They were both waiting for an ancient version of Michael to return to them. A Michael they had both loved purely, even adoringly, but who had died in the middle of the snowy street nine years ago after being struck by an invisible bullet. Amanda saw what Trevor saw, and in their mutual love, only rivalry and hate could be bred. Michael Townley was dead. The only difference between them at present was Trevor hadn't given up. WOULD NEVER give up. Masochistically, he was drawn to the cruel things Michael said and did. But Michael was not his husband. Tracy and Jimmy weren't his kids.. and cruelly, the true nature of the charade they were playing with Patricia in this trailer finally reared it's ugly head. The hurt returned again, then was gone.

Trevor cracked Michael hard across the face. It was spontaneous, and unquestionably the most violent Trevor had ever been with his best friend. He could never hurt Michael, would never tear his flesh. The taste of his blood was a mystery Trevor would never ask for an answer to. But his jape had been cruel. More than maybe he had even intended.

" _Not_ exactly the _explanation_ I was _looking_ for, sugar tits." The Canadian shook the sting out, and stood straight again to resume stroking himself. His own boldness emblazoned his senses, and his cock was growing harder and thicker now in his callused hand. He glared, thick purple rings dragging down the flesh beneath his yellow eyes.

"I was saying that you should _fuck me_ , Michael. ONCE. I wasn't asking for your half-assed _'but I was helping!_ ' excuses. They're pathetic. Look at you, YOU'RE pathetic! What happened to the Michael Townley I _used_ to know? That Michael was a fucking _demon_! He was a _real_ _man_. What are you now? Just some fat asshole in dad shorts with cum stains all over you while you try to fucking pretend like your marriage isn't a _complete_ sham!"

  
*  


Pain radiated across his Michael's face from the point of contact, mirroring the anger and self-loathing vibrating through his body with increasing intensity. The hit had surprised him, though he knew it really shouldn't have. It's just that Trevor had never hit him before. And he never would again, Michael thought with conviction. Michael would _kill him first_. He lay still and taut on the mattress and tried to think, tried to plan but could barely hear the sound of his own thoughts over the increasing static of his blood calling for violence, violence.

And then Trevor had to drag in the tired ghost of glorious Michael fucking Townley _again_. The same surge of anger went through him from when Mrs. Madrazo had brought him Trevor's pristinely kept photos, had pressed them into his palms like communion wafers. Seeing his own young, handsome, _stupid_ face. Hearing the sound of his old name in Trevor's mouth, which even through the hatred and accusation wound up sounding like a sermon.

It was the same fucking story echoing in his skull, _over_ and _over_ again.

_"Way to go, Mikey! That's the fifth liquor store this month! Hot damn, we're gonna be rich as Croesus! We are going places!"_

Lightning fast, he hooked his arm around Trevor's calf and rolled him sideways onto the bed, Trevor's skull narrowly missing the sharp, chipped corner of his bed stand. Half empty pill bottles bounced off the edge of the mattress, filling the room with their hollow rattle.

" _Touchdoooown! Michael Townley does it again! What an incredible run that was from Number 9. Chip, I tell you this kid is going places!"_

Michael shot up the bed, pinning Trevor's still-bouncing body with his weight. He straddled Trevor's chest and slammed a heavy fist into the side of his head with a dull _thud_.

_"Jesus kid can't you do anything right? You looked like a faggot out there on the field. Fucking embarrassing. You're never going anywhere with a pass like that. And I told you to get me some fucking Patriot, not this german piss! Come here you little demon, quit hiding and take what I'm giving like a real man. I swear to christ I'm going to break your fucking legs this time."_

Michael clawed his thick fingers around Trevor's throat and squeezed, hard. He didn't want to fucking _hear it anymore._ Praise and damnation, Trevor and Amanda and his father's voices ricocheted in his skull as he throttled the body beneath him.

" _What do you know about any of it, huh_?" he roared, raining spittle on Trevor's face as it started to color. "I was just another asshole then, and I'm just an asshole now! Why'd you have to–why are you so FUCKING–

He took one of his hands off Trevor's throat and brought it back down across his face, his fist now wet with the water off Trevor's skin and blood from a gash his thumbnail opened on the side of Trevor's face. He wanted a demon? Trevor would _get_ his fucking demon.

  
*  


By nature Trevor had never been any good with strategy. Often times his use of excessive force landed him miles away from his original goal. Sometimes he deviated from his own original plans so far that he barely accomplished anything at all, (other than accruing a truckload of corpses to deal with.) He had ambition, brute strength, and a cornucopia of psychoses to aid him, but without the intelligence of intuition, his efforts were more often than not, fruitless.

Michael dragged him down with ease. He hadn't been expecting it, and as off balance as jacking off in a hips forward stance made him, Michael's own brute strength was also a significant factor. Trevor didn't expect the weight on his chest, he didn't expect the ham-fisted punch which slammed into the side of his skull, and maybe saddest of all, he didn't expect the fingers that crushed around his windpipe in a deadly serious grip. Mikey was trying to kill him.

It certainly wasn't the first time they had traded threats, but Michael's hands squeezed now with sincere enthusiasm in a way that triggered panic in the oxygen-starved recesses of Trevor's brain. His own hands slammed down around them in chaotic impulse, the edge of his fist catching the night stand and toppling it over. The sound of the lamp shattering barely registered, Trevor's senses losing track of the distinctions between things. And then it wasn't Michael on top of him anymore. It was his clarinet teacher. It was his father, (a few of them.) His hockey coach. It was Ryan. Trevor gasped in fury and clawed at Michael's wrists.

_"It'll be a lot easier for you if you don't struggle."_

_"I KNOW YOU'RE IN HERE SOMEWHERE, YOU LITTLE FAGGOT. WAIT UNTIL I FIND YOU, I'M GONNA FUCK YOU PURPLE WITH YOUR OWN SHOE."_

_"Why even bother with all that? You're a very stupid little boy. You're better off running Deluminol for your mommy. Why don't you come over here and sit on my lap?"_

Another hard punch brought him back to himself, even as white hot pain ripped at the inside of his cheek. Trevor could taste blood. He didn't know where it was coming from.

_"Your ass is grass, man. Clearly you never wrestled with a quarterback before!"_

_"Ahh, common Mikey, don't be like that! Whats a little FRIENDLY wrestling between two best buds, eh? Totally platonic, non sexual, uhh.. uhh... you know... locker room, towel snapping... shower time wrestling?"_

_"Heh, I think yer getting your story mixed up there a little bit, pal."_

Trevor suddenly stopped struggling. With an ungodly force of will, he relaxed in Michael's grip, instead sliding his hands patiently up the sides of Michael's thighs, skin on skin beneath the taut fabric of his dad shorts. That first punch had been a boon, for Trevor. A one-time thing. He didn't hurt Michael.

It resonated again, filling him up completely.

He Did. NOT. Hurt. Michael.

Even if he deserved it, (he did,) even if he WANTED to hurt Michael, (he _really_ did,) even if it was completely justified, (it was,) some base instinct always stilled Trevor's fists. They had an agreement between them. It had been struck on the day they met, when Trevor had shoved the mouth of his flare gun with a wet squish into the eye socket of Michael's attacker. A dog didn't bite the hand of his master. It was just that Trevor, in his infinite perennial bad luck, had been unfortunate enough to choose a piece of shit coward as the decision-maker between them. Trevor hit things Michael pointed at. Trevor did not hurt Michael.

Trevor's fingers dug into Michael's thighs, and he let the fatter man punch him.

  
*  


Trevor was dead.

That was Michael's first thought, and he actually stopped mid-punch, his red fist poised above his head. He was panting, and his eyes bulged with fear.

He shifted his thumb and felt for Trevor's pulse, his gesture transforming from murderer to resuscitator in a fluid motion. For a second he couldn't differentiate his own pounding heart with Trevor's, his pulse thumping placidly beneath his fingers.

"T?" Michael said, weakly.

He'd passed out, was his second thought. God, what was he doing? How hard had he been hitting? His fist ached, but it was a far-off ache, a ghost-pain, like his arm was someone else's. He felt like he'd just walked in on himself. _Maybe it's for the best_ , said his father's voice. _A little beating should calm him down, he'll be easier to handle in the morning._

 _"_ T, are you there buddy?" he called, slowly lowering his fist. He curled open his fingers and placed them on Trevor's face. His hands were shaking. He pulled down the dull purple skin beneath Trevor's eye. It was sluggish to respond.

He suddenly realized that Trevor's fingers were clenching bruises into his thighs.

"Hey... come on, this isn't funny," Michael said, his fingers now stroking worry into Trevor's face, his neck. Why wasn't he fighting back? Why wasn't he struggling, trying to run? Why was he just lying there, holding onto him like that? Was he trying to make him stop? Was he trying to make him stay?

"Listen, I—I'm sorry T, I know I shouldn't have left you. I fucked up," Michael said, the words tumbling out of him. These were the words he was trying to remember, the words he had refused to say. Not just since yesterday, but for months, weeks, years. He bent his head and hid it beside Trevor's neck, his face pressed between Trevor's skin and the mattress.

"I fucked up, I fucked up, I fucked up," he said over and over, rocking his body forward and backward, moan-sobbing the words into the dotted lines of CUT HERE. The fingers of his left hand still pawed at Trevor's pulse, his right hand curled up in the wet wisps of his hair. He mouthed the words into his neck, mingling spit with blood, soap and tears, as if the words could resuscitate him, bring him out of this terrifying catatonia.

"I fucked up, I fucked up, I fucked up, please just don't do this, please T come on, Jesus. Hit me, fuck me, threaten to kill me, come on, anything, anything but this."

  
*  


Shit. How about that.

An apology.

An actual, honest to God, bonafied, and absolutely fucking sincere _Michael-Townley-Original_ apology. An apology drenched in disgusting pity tears, sure, (how fucking ' _Michael'_ could this reaction get?) but it was a goddamn apology all the same. Trevor's fingers slackened against the other man's thighs as he blinked repeatedly at the ceiling, attempting to refocus his vision. His brain felt too big. Or, was his skull too small? Either way whatever was happening in there didn't feel good. He coughed wetly, once, feeling Michael's tearful mouth bouncing off his throat. It was the closest they had ever come to a kiss.

"For _fuck_ sake," The words burbled up through a mouth of blood. "...Stop _crying_ , Mikey, Christ! You're worse than Wade!"

He swallowed once, then thinking better of it leaned his head away from Michael and blew a spray of blood over the edge of the bed. At least all his teeth were still there. (Barely.) Michael Townley's bear fists were no laughing matter.

Trevor tongued the rip inside his cheek in a daze, his battered skull making him feel drifty, both weighted and weightless. Something was in there about oxygen deprivation too that he should have learned about in school. (Except, Trevor had never really _gone_ to school. At least never the same one for longer than a year or two.) He allowed his thoughts to float, savoring the strange sensation of not actually having fifteen thousand impulses all screaming for dominance in his head at the same time. If it had been anybody other than Michael, this could have easily been a disaster. A whiteout. One of those times Trevor came-to again with his fist shoved up to the elbow in somebody's stomach laceration. His slack hands slid up Michael's ribs instead, to shove at his barrel of a chest. Naturally, he was heavy. (And...ugh... _moist_.) He was _too_ heavy, like trying to fruitlessly roll out from underneath an emotionally wretched sack of rubble. Michael didn't budge, his thick hands still curled protectively around Trevor's neck in pathetic apology.

The mouth at his tattoo breathed hot, wet air. It was distracting. But in a good way. Trevor was no stranger to pain, but it was the small things he lacked. The intimate, quick moments shared between two people who were professedly attempting to navigate that rare bird called _'a normal relationship'_. It wasn't a term he understood. Certainly Michael _wanted_ to understand, even if he was currently (really, _really_ ) failing. But those moments seemed like they were probably important, somehow. The cheesy shit. The nice shit. The initial shock of their interlude began to recede. Michael hugged him, and thirsty Trevor drank up the affection like a burnt patch of sand.

Michael's apology, his body pressed into Trevor's naked flesh, Michael's heavy stink... even his nauseating tears, which he shed with a kind of desperate sadness Trevor's own experiences twitched in sympathy for, all of it together was a potent love potion Trevor wanted to drink again and again. Even through his brain-rattled fog, Michael's acknowledgement of guilt slowly began to fill the Canadian with a deep and immense satiation. The starving man was finally being fucking fed.

"... So you DO want me to fuck you." Trevor said with sarcasm after a long pause, even as he reached up in an attempt to pry Michael's sweaty hands bodily away from his throat.

  
*  


Michael laughed into Trevor's neck. He was giggling, almost—small breathless laughs shuddered through him, and he even hiccuped once or twice. He vaguely remembered something about how people in shock were prone to giggling, and that made him laugh even more. He felt Trevor's hands on him, trying to pull him away. He resisted. He clung to Trevor's neck like a child clinging to his mother, too shy to show his face. He was still feeling very unstable, and was relishing the feeling of Trevor's body breathing under him. And even though Trevor had already called him out on crying, he still _hadn't technically seen him cry_ , and that was a state of things that Michael needed to preserve.

Finally he acquiesced, quickly wiping the residual tears and snot on the mattress before pushing himself back up onto his knees. He balanced his weight carefully, being careful to not actually sit on Trevor's stomach. He was suddenly very aware of his weight, his bulkiness. He felt exceedingly clumsy in the aftermath of vulnerability.

Even in the dark of the bedroom he could see Trevor's face glistening with blood and sweat, his yellow eyes glittering. Michael's fist glistened to match Trevor's face, and he felt a deep welling of shame and self-loathing.

"I'll be right back," he muttered, and ghosted his fingers over Trevor's belly in a motion meant to comfort. He grunted as he hauled his weight over Trevor's body and up onto his feet. He cast around the room for a towel, found one crumpled by the closet door. He swept it up and picked his way to the bathroom, keeping a careful eye out for shards of glass and debris from Trevor's... well, from yesterday. He ran the towel under the sink and wrung it out several times before bringing it back to the bedroom.

"Here," he said, handing the warm, wet towel to Trevor. "For your, uh, face."

He sat down on the bed and watched him awkwardly, his hand reached out to encircle Trevor's ankle.

  
*  


The wretched giggling coming out of Michael sounded manic. Still surprisingly passive, Trevor laid still and listened to the sound. It tugged at something deep inside him, at memories he would sooner banish forever than be forced to relive in such a way. Michael's laughter was a desperate sound. A hollow sound, full of fear and regret. Trevor remembered being 11 years old and pulling the trigger on a hunting trip with his third foster father. He watched the side of a doe's face blow out in a mist of gore. Her corpse had twitched under his fingers when he had collapsed next to her a minute later, and then the man whose hands Trevor remembered but whose face had vanished with time pressed a knife over his shoulder. _'she's pregnant'_ he'd said with cold finality. It was the first time Trevor had felt the hot gush of blood rushing over his fingers. He wanted to forget that feeling, even if, like a right of passage, it had been his initial introduction to so many other things. It had taught him the technique he applied to the stray bloodhound he found on the side of the highway six months later. Trevor remembered laughing like Michael, dog's blood staining the front of his shorts. And he remembered the wretched sounds his own body had made a few hours ago, lost and alone, still buried inside the slimy body of a cold corpse. Michael unwittingly forced the memories back up, like bile you couldn't swallow.

When Michael finally sat back, Trevor regarded him with a mixture of suspicion and irritation. Tears and Trevor didn't meet in the middle in a friendly way. When Trevor cried, it was an activity that consumed his whole body, leaving him a crumpled, devastated smear on the filthy ground. Michael had managed to swallow approximately 75% of his tears, but his thick jaw still glimmered in the dark (even darker now that the room was sans-lamp) in a way that made Trevor want to hit him again. Who was the fucked up one, here? Michael might come out of this with a teensy bruise, but Trevor was more than likely to sport a black eye by tomorrow morning. (Ever the same fucking story.) He was lucky that the rip inside his cheek from where a tooth had cut into him had stopped bleeding, that it seemed like it didn't require stitches. Because snot-faced Michael Townley would have been the one to dive his ass to the emergency room. Trevor could see through the quickly purpling shiner he sported, but probably not for long. He wanted to shout at Michael. To fill the room with obscenities. He was about to spit out a thick _'get a fucking hold of yourself'_ when Michael's hand brushed over his vulnerable stomach, and Trevor's flesh jumped hard under the touch. Vulnerable confusion passed over his bloody face, forcing him to swallow his own words. He sat up on his elbows and watched Michael leave.

When the other man returned with towel a few minutes later, it was to a typically conflicted Trevor. He took the wet cloth from Michael wordlessly, his uncharacteristic silence signalling a deep inner confusion, and pressed the towel to his face. It came away more red than he had expected. Michael had never hit him before. Sure, they had wrestled, thrown each other around a few times, especially after a few drinks towards the end of their time in Yankton. But they had been the kind of frustrated bar brawls that ended with a bouncer tossing them both out, where they would trudge home together, shoulder-to-shoulder.

Apparently it was a day for breaking rules. One for one, Trevor huffed to himself. The Canadian had broken his first and foremost commandment; Thou Shalt Not Strike Michael Townley. Trevor's hands had torn flesh apart, tortured, prodded, ripped teeth, cracked jaws, disemboweled, harmed children and the elderly. But Michael had been there when Trevor had needed him. Michael had been the first person to reach down the well and slog Trevor up out of it. Michael had given Trevor a path to follow, and had offered him the kindness of a truly original friendship. Trevor didn't hit Michael not because he didn't _want_ to, but because... hitting Michael, in a way, would be like tearing down the last little bit of human decency Trevor remembered ever having. Decency that was gifted to him by a cocksure, self-obsessed quick shot with a criminal sparkle in his eye. Michael _fucking_ Townley.

Michael's fingers wrapped around Trevor's ankle, and Trevor felt something inside himself snap. The intimacy of the touch pulled him back through time, assuring him completely of Michael's strange co-dependence in their fucked up love affair, friendship, hateship... whatever the fuck it was that they were doing here... Whatever it was that they had been doing since the moment they met. It was completely ridiculous. It was a glorious sham, a universally singular piece of fuckery. Michael, Trevor, Brad, Amanda, Lester, all of it. The whole package.

Trevor sat up with a dangerous purpose, throwing the towel to the side even as his eyes filled with the horrible focus of a crocodile. As long as they were breaking rules...

Michael's hair was just long enough to grab an inch of and hold fast to. Trevor wrenched their mouths together, forcing his coppery tongue past Michael's teeth. He would let Michael hit him again and again, if that was the price he had to pay. He just needed this one thing. This... _one_... moment. To let Michael know that he was with him, _would always_ be with him. It was the only thing in his life that he had ever _really fucking_ _wanted_. Trevor would go back to trying to bury his monster's heart under a metric ton of drugs, guns, and corpses after Michael would inevitably leave. But for that disgusting, bloody, tear-stained piece of shit moment in history, he needed the comfort.

  
*  


Michael felt a flash of fear as Trevor's body pulled that hair-trigger switch between inaction and action. As he slithered toward him across the mattress Michael felt for the second time in as many days that this is when he would die. He remembered Trevor's grim, looming face in the car, his terror then, the completely sure feeling he had that Trevor would rip out his throat with his teeth. But this time he didn't do a backflip out of the window, though a large part of him told him to. He deserved this. He stayed put, even opened himself to welcome the sure death slouching his way.

So when Trevor crushed their mouths together in desperate loneliness, something slotted into place in Michael. He understood now, of course, _of course_ , that this is what had happened, of course this is what he had been running way from. All this time.

Michael grimaced at first, overly conscious of his twenty-four-hours-with-no-toothpaste breath. Trevor didn't seem to clock it, the shitty taste or his embarrassment. But then Michael laughed, huffing and smiling into Trevor's grimly focused mouth, because this was the opposite of how he'd always imagined it—his breath minty fresh and Trevor's full of death and disease. Trevor's mouth held the bright, coppery taste of blood mixed with the chemical bitterness of bar soap (?). It wasn't exactly conventionally pleasant, but it was what it was and it was far from the worst Michael had imagined.

Though Trevor had approached him with such fierce determination, was kissing him with such purpose, his entire body was still angled awkwardly away from him on the bed. It had taken such strange courage to get to this point, Michael thought, for Trevor to approach _him_ , to Break the Rules, that Michael was filled with an overwhelming fondness. He was flooded with a tangential memory of a time long past, when he'd still been too poor to afford separate rooms for his children. Tracey, older and angrier and always The Boss, had separated her side of the room from Jimmy's with bright red tape. But Jimmy would toddle forward and place only his big toe over the line, keeping the rest of his body back. As if to say I'm brave and I'm an asshole, but I'm no idiot and I know when to run if necessary.

Michael dragged Trevor forward the rest of the way onto his lap, securing his back with firm hands. This was a conscious repetition of their position from earlier, when Michael had so grievously erred. A corrective measure, he thought, running his hands across Trevor's broad, naked back, feeling his skin prickle from cold and touch. He would repeat this, again and again, until he got it right. He would show Trevor he understood now, that he was sorry, he was changed. He wouldn't run from this again.

  
*  


Electricity and excitement were the dominant sensations registering upfront. Michael _hadn't_ pushed him away in disgust. Michael _wasn't_ mocking him, calling him a fag, _wasn't_ sweating or puking or _running_ as hard and as fast as his significantly more ample legs could carry him, (for once.) Michael fucking Townley was _kissing him back_ , and Trevor swallowed the surprised if not genial chuckle the other man cut loose, hungrily eating it up. Michael's thick arms dragged him closer, until Trevor straddled his wide lap again and he could use the upper angle to yank Michael's head back and lick his teeth. Like a kid in a candy store, it was sensory overload, too many options and simply not enough hands to grab everything at once. Except this was Trevor Philips, and when Trevor Philips wanted something, concepts like _'caution'_ or _'moderation'_ didn't exist.

"...Michael..." He groaned the pained name into the mouth below his own, his own voice revealing a little too much as he rolled down with his hips. "... _Fuck_ , Mikey... Mikey..."

It was easy to forget the pain. The sharp bright white cracks were receding rapidly into nonexistence. Trevor was used to pain, to being fucked with, to being laid on his back. A childhood spent fending off attackers and family members alike had dulled him to concepts like holding grudges. Now that he was an adult, he made sure _nobody_ knocked him down. TREVOR PHILIPS did the knocking. But... Michael, of _all people_ , was allowed a good punch or two. He wasn't ANGRY with Michael, for fucking once in his life. Instead, Trevor felt something manic inside himself swell up with an insatiable hunger. He was struck by a pathetic, childlike feeling of neediness. He needed his friend, needed Michael to consume him as badly as he wanted to do the consuming. His hands shoved themselves up the front of Michael's shirt, caressing the hard curve of the hairy stomach they found. He inexpertly kissed Michael harder, pushing up on the edge of the mattress with one knee to come down over the other man with aggressive force. It was enough enthusiasm to push Michael back in a hard shove, and Trevor toppled over on top of him, still incapable of breaking the kiss which had triggered the heinous reaction in the first place.

"Fuck... Michael... " Trevor mumbled between peppering his face with sticky kisses. "When did you get so _fucking fat_?"

He had wanted this so badly, for so many years. He had imagined kissing Michael Townley's tight-lipped frown again and again, a secret desire he had buried deep, deep down underneath hundreds of leagues of pain and fear. He never thought this moment would come. Did Michael really have no concept of his own power? Trevor had worked hard over the years to convince Michael that he should be afraid, that if Michael pushed him too far, Trevor would snap. It was the only security measure Trevor could take to protect himself against what was happening now, the thing he had been holding back since puking with Michael Townley on the side of the highway. Now his hungry desire bled out like a powerful river breaking a dam, frightening, psychotic puppydog adoration rolling off his naked body and pooling down on the man below him. He ripped their mouths apart, breathing heavily, his pupils blown wide with lust and illness in the dark room. His callused hand slithered down the front of Michael's shorts, grabbing his cock.

"...Even your _dick_ got fatter, Mikey, _Christ_."

  
*  


The way Trevor was saying his name should have been outlawed. He'd never heard this name said that way before, from somebody paid or otherwise. Fuck, his _wife_ had never said it with that much raw need behind it, with that much pain and desperation. Something hitherto unknown in Michael responded with a lust bordering on violence, and Michael pulled Trevor down harder, surged up to meet his rolling hips. He wanted to get at that voice, it _needed_ him, it's just that their stupid, broken bodies were in the way. All matter and human history was just a conspiracy to keep them apart. Trevor knew that, of course he knew that, the way he was clawing under his clothes, grabbing and pulling at Michael's loose belly skin. It was just another layer in the way.

Another fond, surprised laugh broke out of him as Trevor shoved him back on the bed, toppled over him. He felt a warm, manic energy vibrating through Trevor's body as he kissed and licked his face like a massive, disturbingly erotic golden retriever.

He couldn't help but seize up, though, when Trevor mentioned his weight. His kissing slowed, and he felt himself recede—an odd, disembodied feeling. It was not a cool or manly thing to care about, he was well aware. This was the part where he should be laughing, quipping back about Trevor's receding hairline or yellow teeth. But his flabby body wasn't brought up in a sexual context by anyone other than Amanda, and he associated it with coldness, with disappointment and waning desire. Michael fought to stay present, to push off thoughts of not being enough, of failure.

His self-consciousness had the unfortunate side effect of making his dick less than fully erect when Trevor dragged it out of his pants, though still enough so to elicit another fat joke. God, if he seized up now, he was pretty sure Trevor would eat him. Fuck it, he'd eat himself. Now was not the time for mid-life crises. But also, unfortunately, he happened to be Michael de Santa, so it was _pretty much always_ time for mid-life crises.

"Eh heh," he laughed awkwardly, and pulled his filthy, rucked up shirt back down over the curve of his stomach. _Come on Townley. Get it together._

  
*  


Trevor was considering eating Michael. Not in a stew sense, fortunately for Townley, but more in a swallow-his-dick-so-deep-it-reaches-China sense. In a fuck-and-get-fucked-so-hard-it-starts-a-cum-tsunami sense. And, well, ok... _fine_ , maaaaaybe a _little bit_ in the stew sense. But only just a little.

Preoccupied with the task of beginning to pop the top of Michael's fly, Trevor barely caught a hammy fist in his peripheral vision pulling the Binco shirt back down. Like heat lightning, the crocodile eyes swept back up to Michael's face, leveling him with a thunderous look that bordered on death-threat.

"Are you being _modest_ with me, Townley?" The question was incredulous.

He instantly abandoned the cock in his hand and shoved Michael's fingers down against the mattress. The gesture was simultaneously possessive, rough, and unfriendly in a way only Trevor could be. He ripped Michael's shirt back up. It rucked up under the prone man's chin and Trevor plunged his face in hungry ecstasy into the folds of the tits he found. His tongue slid greedily across hairy skin, leaving a slippery spit trail from bellybutton to collar bone. Michael was HARD and SOLID and FIRM in all the best ways. Trevor wanted to worship here, to build a fucking house here, to stay here forever, naked and pressed hard up against the crevices of Townley's perfect folds. But there was so much more still left to eat. On second thought after a minute of sloppy gnawing, Trevor sat up straight, straddling Michael's torso. His own cock was a dark angry hue in the shadowy room, resting heavily on Michael's half-unbottoned shorts. Trevor spit in his hand before wrapping it around them both, squeezing with his whole palm in frustratingly slow jerks. He leaned forward to rub their heads against the soft underside of Michael's stomach, his neck dropping and a groan tearing low out of a deep place in his chest.

In that moment, nothing about Michael wasn't perfect. He stank to high heaven, an intoxicating smell, like stale sweat and dried out pussy juice and blood and sour liquor. Had he fucked someone before coming home? The thought was frothing, as visions of Michael's strong back moving back and forth as he pushed into a strange hole brought Trevor frighteningly close to the edge. His hand stopped, fingers un-clenching to hover millimeters off their hot skin. He would blow his load in two seconds if he didn't take at least a little fucking care.

"I want you to fuck me, Michael. You understand me here, cupcake?" Trevor's growl lowered an octave as he glared down in lusty hunger. he grabbed a fistful of Michael's shirt and yanked on it, still frustratingly attached to his body. "I wanted you to fuck me back at the fucking _strip club_ , you retired piece of shit! I didn't want some _kid_ you _collected_. It's only ever been you."

  
*  


Michael gave a small offended cry as his fingers were bent backward on the grimy surface of the mattress. But if he was surprised by the motion, he was thoroughly astounded by what Trevor did next. Trevor surged into his flesh, worshipping him and _handling_ him in a way he'd never felt before. When Michael fucked women, it was about their bodies, not his, and he did what he could to keep it that way. When he'd fucked men, though it had been a while, he was a stand-in for someone else, a figment of a father, a lost lover, a coach. This was honestly the first time he felt like _his_ body was being touched, appreciated, worshipped. Michael's momentary dysphoria was knocked out of him and he was sent rocketing back into his body, feeling every lick and slime of Trevor's tongue across his chest and stomach. It was all he could do to hold on to Trevor's shoulders, arms, anywhere he could get purchase and just stare at him with huge, stupid eyes and be _touched_ while Trevor crawled across him like a spider monkey.

When Trevor shifted gears and clenched their dicks together in his vise-like grip, Michael let out a sort of stunned moan. The stroke of Trevor's thumb across his cock, the knowledge that it was pressed against Trevor's, that Trevor was feeling an almost perfectly mirrored pleasure: all of this was almost too much to bear. He dug his thick fingers into Trevor's shoulders and thrust against him, felt the tip of his own cock press precum into his belly. Suddenly Trevor was making a deep guttural sound that vibrated through his pelvis and made him squeeze Trevor's shoulder hard just to keep either of them from popping early. Christ, he felt like a teenager—but it was the sounds, how had he missed these sounds?

And then Trevor was talking at him angrily, commanding him in a deep, insanely Canadian voice to put his dick in Trevor's ass like it wasn't already The Only Possible Outcome In The Universe. Like it wasn't what every conversation they'd ever had, every punch they'd thrown, every bullet they'd put into somebody else's brain was leading toward. It was only ever this.

Michael was suddenly very tired of not kissing Trevor. He hauled Trevor up for more kissing while he hooked one thumb into his horrible pants and underwear and shimmied them off of his ass. He kicked them to the edge of the mattress as he experimented with Trevor's mouth, pushed his tongue in as far as Trevor would let him. It felt good, so good to penetrate him this way, and Trevor just let him, even moaned a little into his mouth. Meanwhile he was still pulling and scratching at Michael's shirt, still seemingly angry at its continued existence. Michael obliged by peeling the wretched thing up over his head and flinging it into the darkness.

Finally they were both naked, and Michael celebrated the moment by pulling Trevor's body down flat against his and just touching him everywhere, wherever he could. He rubbed his thick calves against Trevor's, feeling their wiry leg hairs snag and pull at one another, and scraped his toenails across the underside of Trevor's feet. Their stomachs melted together, creating obscene little pockets of air that in another life would have made Michael very embarrassed but now felt natural, even weirdly erotic. One hand moved to caress Trevor's nipple while the other kept constant pressure on the back of Trevor's skull, pressing his mouth closer, his tongue deeper. He hooked one leg up around the back of Trevor's thighs and ground their hips and cocks together, brought his one hand down to pull and massage at Trevor's perfect ass. Anything, everything to increase the friction and the amount of Trevor's body that was touching his.

"Listen I get it now," Michael growled into Trevor's neck, continuing a conversation they'd been having through touch as much as through words, "I fucked up. I should have pulled that girl off your dick in the bathroom. I should have fucked you up onto the stage or in that nasty pleather booth. I should have fucked you in the car, I should have fucked you in the alley, I should have been fucking you for twenty mother fucking years now for CHRIST'S SAKE tell me you have a fucking condom."

Michael was unraveling from the feeling of Trevor's cock slip-sliding through the sweaty crease of his thigh. He needed to get going on this now because he already felt like he was going to blow, and he would not be satisfied until he enjoyed a good solid hour of just steady, filthy plowing of Trevor's insides.

"WAIT," he barked, and with one last frustrated bite at Trevor's bottom lip, he pushed him off and dove toward his discarded pants. The hooker, of course, he'd bought condoms at the truck stop! He ripped them out of his pants pocket and then paused to examine the package. They were pre-lubed, but... well, it had been A While since he'd had anal, but he knew it was going to take a little more than the dollop included in the package. It would be enough to help in getting the condom over his fat cock, but not enough to facilitate the kind of fucking he had in mind.

"You uh, you wouldn't happen to have any lube, would you?"

  
*  


"AUGH, God DAMN it, Michael," Trevor roared in frustration, lying half across the bed, half slung over the end from where Michael had deposited him in a sudden fit. Now that they had agreed that kissing was permissible, it left him hornier and angrier than he had been in years. "Who _gives_ a fuck? Just fuck me already, I'm not your fucking _wife_ , I'm not going to cry!"

He needed to get this OVER WITH. He felt like a sexual terrorist, as if there was a gigantic ticking clock above them counting down to an inevitable nuclear explosion. He wanted to slam Michael's face down onto the floor and grind into his backside. But, no. _No, no no no no_... that _wasn_ 't what _this_ was about. This was supposed to be the other way around. THE OTHER WAY around. It was an opportunity to satiate a mystery which had serviced as masturbatory nitro fuel since he had been twenty years old. Trevor's chest rose and fell in manic pants, his eyes glazed over but still wide open, as if he were afraid to blink, afraid to look away for fear that all of this was nothing more than some horribly convoluted fantasy. He was afraid that this was another wet dream, and that soon he would wake up next to a sticky pool again, hungry and alone.

Trevor's right eye was beginning to swell and he squinted through the bruise in the dark at the reticent look that came over Michael at his suggestion of the spit-approach. Townley's whole body stiffened with discomfort at the idea. That was right, wasn't it? Not ever with Trevor, but he'd seen it before, when Michael flirted with women at the bar, or with the whores he briefly entertained himself with. Michael was a ~gentleman~. He wanted to ~service~ his partners, to treat them ~kindly~. It was a crock of horse shit. Trevor needed the violence, wanted the pain to knock him out of the fantasy coma he was in so that he wouldn't blow his load instantaneously and then have to deal with the aftermath.

But Michael's face argued the point, even in the dark. Trevor scowled furiously, and threw himself over onto his stomach to rifle through the garbage chunks on the ground which had once been his side table. He pushed his hand through splintery wood and broken glass, until after a long rooting moment, he produced a mostly empty plastic tub of grimy yellow Vaseline. Jerk-off grease. To keep himself from chafing his...ah... _more sensitive areas_.

"Happy?" He demanded gruffly, holding it up. Trevor unscrewed the lid as he climbed to his knees, then shoved his hand in to scrape the bottom for a quarter-sized dallop. He threw it at Michael, watched it bounce off his chest and hit the end of the bed. Then with zero preamble, reached behind himself and pushed the greasy digit up his ass. He grimaced in pain immediately, but worked himself anyway, wringing his finger around in circles and forcing it up past the knuckle. He raised a knee to help the angle, his eyes slowly lidding as he stared at Michael, his body barely relaxing. (If he hadn't already been coming down from his drug-fueled 24 hour bender, this would have been much more of a nightmare.) Again, the hammer of time pressured him on, as the silhouette of his best friend reminded him how absurd all of this was, how fucking fleeting it would probably be. He didn't even bother trying to suck Michael's dick, knowing the added stimulus would either be the end for both of them, or be the trigger that sent his fat fuck of a best friend running for the door after it was over, (leaving Trevor unsatisfied and alone. AGAIN.) He gracelessly shoved a second finger inside himself, grunting uncomfortably.

The condom wrapper in Michael's hand glinted in the dark. Michael didn't keep condoms for no reason. He had _never_ arbitrarily kept condoms. Trevor's eyes narrowed, even as his teeth clenched with strain.

" _Hmmmmmh_ , so you _did_ just fuck somebody, Mikey." Trevor let loose a single dark, gravely chuckle. "...so did I."

  
*  


Michael's eye twitched as Trevor hauled out the crusty tub of Vaseline.

"Come on, T, that's barely a step up from Crisco," he whined as Trevor scooped out a lump with two fingers then flung the container at Michael's stomach. He didn't even bother to try and catch it, just watched it bounce across the bedroom floor unhappily. Michael may have been about to fuck a meth head in the ass in a pile of trailer garbage, but he still had _standards._

His attention was quickly pulled back to Trevor by the sounds of his exertion. With a long-suffering sigh, he plucked the tin off the floor and moved around the side of the bed.

"Well, if it makes you feel any better, it was a waste of fifty bucks," he said, tugging on Trevor's arm to dislodge his fingers. With a light shove he toppled Trevor backward onto the mattress, then pulled him closer by one skinny ankle. He kneeled on the edge of the bed and draped Trevor's leg over his thigh while he lathered one, two, three thick fingers.

"Anyway, so much for 'it was only ever me,'" he teased as he lightly traced the rim of Trevor's hole with greasy fingertips. He wasn't jealous, not really. Well, a little. But jealousy felt stupid somehow. It was irrelevant here, in this dream space they were sharing. It all felt so far away. Possessiveness—consuming, selfish possessiveness—now that had its place here. That was between them and their demons. But other people, they belonged outside, not here in the sweat and darkness, outside time and history and light.

Without preamble (or giving Trevor a chance to respond), he inserted the tips of his index and middle finger into Trevor's ass. He felt Trevor's anal ring spasm and jerk around his fingers, sending another rush of blood to his cock. God, a part of him wanted to bypass this altogether. And he knew from well-broadcast signals that if Trevor had his way he'd be fucking him dry, no prep, probably as some kind of violent, inexplicable penance. Or maybe as reenactment of some ancient masochistic ritual from Trevor's personal history. But that wasn't who he was, Michael thought desperately, his eyes sliding guiltily over Trevor's swelling eye. He'd done enough damage for today.

Michael smoothed his other hand over Trevor's lower belly, brushing the top of his pubic hair with his thumb. He rubbed slow, soothing circles into his abdomen, trying to help Trevor's body relax while he worked his fingers up to the second knuckle. Subtle muscles flexed in his arm as he scissored his fingers in wider circles, slowly opening him up. He smoothed his fingertips over the ridges of flesh inside him, felt his mouth go dry as he imagined the feeling around his swollen cock. As he added in his ring finger he felt Trevor jump, felt his cock bounce off his thumbnail. It was partly flaccid from what must have been the pain and concentration of the proceedings. Without warning, he remembered a bar napkin covered in spidery black letters, legibility blurred in the shape of condensation from the bottom of a pint glass. Tonight was a night for breaking rules...

After rubbing one last circle on his belly, Michael propped Trevor's cock up in one thick fist and slowly sank his mouth down over the head.

  
*  


Trevor Philips was 11 years old the first time he encountered an erection other than his own. A stepfather's... or had it been his clarinet teacher? The faces melted with time, but the dick stayed firmly planted in that nightmare memory. Veiny, bulbous, uncut... nothing special, in all actuality. But this was the memory of a kid... A _deeply troubled_ boy, so it could never be anything other than horrifying. Considering his consistent track record of bad luck and poor circumstance, in many ways Trevor was lucky it had taken as long as it had to happen. But _happen it did_ , triggering the beginning of a long downward spiral that would eventually become an entire identity. The sad, violent little boy was swept under the carpet, and the subsequent damage to his psyche from this particular encounter continued to reverberate with violent force throughout the rest of his adult life. It was, unfortunately, the first of many such encounters Trevor would be unwittingly tricked into over the period of his adolescence.

The first time Trevor voluntarily gave up his then only spiritual virginity, he was 15. He lived in a trailer park with a foster family who had a fat daughter with red hair. She had zits on her back and braces on her teeth, but her tits were huge and she seduced Trevor with startling ease. They consummated their relationship on a heap of mulch in the woods out behind the park. Weeks later when his foster parents found them _consummating_ on an old abandoned refrigerator in the middle of the day, it was Trevor's first one-way ticket to the boy's reformatory he would visit again twice more in his life. To his chagrin, he found during his stay there that _somehow_ , he liked a dick better than a clit anyway.

The day Trevor's life grotesquely collided with Michael's, he had spent the morning pulling intestines out of the stray dogs he had been boredom hunting on the side of the highway over the last week. Something about their soft bellies was alluring in a way he couldn't quite comprehend, though he knew it had something to do with that redhead's pendulous tits grinding in the mulch, and his mother's red fingernails, and the way his hockey coach kept looking him up and down. Michael had torn up to the plane in his dusty Toyota Chaser, sliding the back of the car out to sling the frame around as he leaned out of the driver's side window and fired shots at the second pursuing vehicle. It had snowed that day, but Trevor remembered the engine's exhaust rushing in a hot gust across his face.

" _Hey pal,_ " Michael's aggravated, demanding voice had cut into the previously quiet airstrip. " _...wanna give me a hand here?_ "

Love at first sight... Or something like that.

Michael fucking Townley was like a brick wall. He was cocksure, scheming, and a surgeon with a gun in his hand. His brain worked in ways Trevor didn't (couldn't) understand. Michael had _goals_. Michael knew how to _spell_. Michael had _plans_. _Lucrative plans._ And Townley was forever pouring out these heinous one-liners from the cheesy classic action flicks he liked so much, as a sort of melodramatic affirmation of his own decisions. (It was... charming.) For the _first time_ in Trevor's life, the idea of leaving the trailer park was offered to him freely. Michael talked with vigor about taking scores over plates of hot hamburgers with gravy, steaming bowls of minestrone, platters of scrambled eggs and cheap diner coffee. Cigarette smoke hung over his buzzcut in a dirty halo. He drew maps on napkins. He was brazen in a fight. He drank beer like a champion. For someone without focus or direction, Michael was impossible not to adore.

Trevor took his adoration to the next level the first time he dropped to his knees for Michael. They were 22, stupid, young, horny. By basic rule of thumb, Trevor hated sucking cock and didn't do it. He deplored it, actually. He hated it more than taking downers, or listening to somebody crying. (Or literally any combination of those things.) But especially in those earlier years, Trevor had suffered from a sort of abject puppydog adoration that though not often spoke of, was acted on as frequently as possible. He was obsessed with thanking Michael for pulling him out of himself, for giving him a direction. For saving him, in less as many words, even if asking Trevor point-blank about it would only earn you a broken nose. And, yes, there was a lingering sense of attraction. But it had been more confusing back then, less clearly seen for what it was, half fueled by their powerful friendship and half by the fucked up cocktail of problems still spilling over from Trevor's childhood. Michael accepted the come-ons mostly only if he was a little bit drunk, and if the conditions were just-so; it had to be dark, they had to be alone, it was understood that it would be a one-sided interaction, and they didn't talk about it after. Or ever.

It got easy pushing away the cold indifference to his needs, the heartless rejection after getting Michael off. Michael was straight. This was a special arrangement. Trevor was just paying dues, or something like that. Though the lines sometimes disconcertingly blurred when the gruff Canadian would jerk them off together, pressing Michael up against a tree in the chilly dark. They didn't look at each other, but ground hard against one another as they tipped closer to the edge. It was a little too gay for Michael in the end, and it only ended up happening two or three times.

Michael's hot mouth sunk down on Trevor's cock in the dark, and for the first fucking time in his life, he could finally give those old memories the finger.

If the Canadian had ever wished for his past self to see any part of his life now, _this_ would have been the moment. His life was a fucking joke, with any serious fucking honesty, despite this little sham of a family and his cute little enterprise with the guns he missed the drop for half the time, and the drugs he blew up his own nose, or smoked, or injected, or ate dribbled on little bits of bitter paper. His success was hearsay. But this... THIS... This was a fucking victory. This was a moment he would need to ingrain so he could pull it out and examine it later in the blackness of nighttime, when he would inevitably be alone again.

...And he had approximately fifteen seconds to do it.

" _FUCK!_ MICHAEL." Trevor barked, jarringly loud, as he slammed a hand down on the back of Michael's neck and thrust up into his mouth. Fuck. Fuck. _Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck it wasn't fucking possible what the fuck was this about how could Michael fucking voluntarily just, fuck, fuck, fucking fuck_ \- His fingers twisted with intensity in Michael's hair, roving up to the top to grip it at the roots, pulling, pushing, and thrusting with the bobbing motions. Michael's execution was sub-par to average, his novice status with this particular activity apparent, but in all honestly it didn't fucking matter. The mere concept of Michael's mouth on his cock alone was strong enough to reinvigorate Trevor's hard-on. But it was the three fingers in his ass that rapidly tipped him over the edge. As if he hadn't already been frothing at the dick like some kind of tweaked out teenager, wasn't this the fucking cherry on top? The vision of Townley's receding hairline bobbing over his dick matched with a sudden stroke of those thick fingers against something deep and secret tore a long groan out of Trevor without his consent. The sound shifted soon after into something like pain, a whimpering plead to make the torture stop, both sad and hungry as his body convulsed. He pushed up as far as he could with one hand while shoving Michael's head down with the other in senseless forgetfulness.

" _I can't... Mikey!_ " Trevor swallowed a sudden gasp, the sound hissing out between clenched teeth, and he came hard, unexpectedly and with no preamble, into Michael's hot mouth.

The leathery criminal fell bonelessly back, ignoring the sounds of Michael hacking up his surprise mouthful of jizz in favor of the afterglow. It stretched out in a sweet heavy fog as Michael coughed, Trevor feeling approximately zero percent sense of shame. The feeling that DID slowly begin to come on was... what? Indignation? No, reproach? He sat up on an elbow again and glared at Michael, accusation cutting across his bruised face. It was as if Michael had just eaten the last cookie in the box without asking. As if Trevor had invited him to a birthday party, and Michael had popped all the balloons. As if Trevor was eluding that he somehow was trying to hold on to that orgasm and squirrel it away for a more appropriate moment than this. He glared, his mussed expression somehow still thick with lust, and he clamped his asshole down hard on the fingers still inside him. It was petulant, a teenager's prod.

"What do I owe you, 50 bucks? Jesus, Mikey, I didn't even know you knew how to fucking do that!" The tone was joking, though Trevor's eyes yellow narrowed. His swelling purple eye was now almost completely shut.

"You owe me 25 years of those, you piece of shit!"

A sudden gut-feeling hit Trevor as he regarded Michael over his sweaty, cummy stomach.

He had never been happier in his life.

  
*  


Michael gulped down the lode in a surprised attempt to keep his gag reflex from activating. The back of his mouth and throat ached from the beating, and he tasted bile along with the thick, salty taste of Trevor's cum. When he was finished coughing, he rubbed and worked his jaw as he glared down at Trevor's smug, boneless shape. A part of him (a pretty fuckin' large part of him) was murderous that Trevor had overpowered him, had used him like that. If he was any other man Michael would have bit his dick off. Of course, if he were any other man then his dick wouldn't have been in Michael's mouth in the first place. So there was that.

Another part of him, though—one that didn't mesh quite as well with his apparently casual masculinity—was _incredibly_ turned on. This was at the core of Michael's enraging, confusing sexual attraction to Trevor. He was pure id, Bacchanalia. With most women, Michael had developed the sexual persona of a daddy—dominant and strong but also safe, almost nurturing. Trevor, on the other hand, fucked like it was the end of the world, with no regard for who (or what) he was fucking, completely lost in his own animal pleasure. Even when they were younger and Trevor was doing his worship-fucking thing with Michael, he still had this rough, almost petulant way of ensuring his own release. Michael knew with an abiding certainty that he was the only person whose own sexual pleasure Trevor had paid even the slightest attention. He hoarded this self-determined fact, had let its decided truthfulness tip him over the edge many a lonely night these past years.

So he would let this one pass. Besides, Michael knew with The Most Perverse Guilt that he'd done enough to deserve a heavy face-fucking tonight.

A constriction around his fingers brought him back into his body, reminded him of how their two bodies were still connected. He wiggled the tips of his fingers in response, tickling Trevor's insides.

"Yeah, well, I can think of something else I owe you 25 years of," Michael said, and wrapped his thumb and forefinger around the tip of his own thick cock just in case Trevor didn't get the message. He didn't pause for the accompanying groan.

Reluctantly, Michael withdrew his fingers from inside Trevor and went for the condom package. His fingers were slippery with various fluids, so he used his teeth to tear the corner. He sputtered excess lube from the packaging off of his lips and rolled the prophylactic down over his cock. His flushed skin shone darkly from under the thin latex, stretched tight around his girth.

He paused then, still kneeling in front of Trevor with one skinny leg draped over his thigh. He swept his left hand over Trevor's leg and let his right fall back to Trevor's anus, traced the wet, swollen rim with his thumb. That motion was the closest he got to asking if this was still alright. He didn't ask the question because he didn't want to know the answer, didn't want to live with himself if the answer was no because he would go on anyway, had known with dire biological certainty that this night would end with him planted in Trevor's ass, regardless. Maybe he wasn't so different from Trevor, after all.

So he settled for a different question—still somewhat conscientious of Trevor's needs, while omitting any possibility of not going forward. His voice came out much lower than he remembered it ever sounding, almost raw:

"How do you want to do this?"

  
*  


"Hmmmnnn, weeelllll, Mikey, I'm pretty sure you _twist_ it into a _point_ and then you _stick it in_."

Trevor rumbled a sarcastic response, though it was thickly undercut by his obvious state of edgy arousal. Michael's thumb played at Trevor's hole as he fisted the tip of his thick cock, and the severe glint of purpose in the thief's eyes shot straight to Trevor's dick. His mouth went dry, and suddenly he was 20 again, raw and lonely and afraid. And above all, so, _so_ fucking hungry. His heart hammered faster as he watched Michael roll the condom down over his hard, neglected dick. Fuck, when was the last time he'd seen that? It had been years ago, when Michael had been at the pinnacle of his obsession with call girls. He had fucked one while Trevor slept in the same hotel room, a mere few feet away in the next twin bed. Trevor had listened with a lip between his teeth to his partner grunting quietly nearby under a thick felt blanket. The thing about it was, thinking back after all these years, Michael knew that Trevor only ever slept after a crash, and then hardly ever at night.

"You could give it to me sissy, Michael, you could fuck me with a _broom handle_ , as long as it's _you_ I honestly don't _give a_ fuck. You're stalling, you fat sycophant, so just _do it_!" The words were boiling up like a thick paste and Trevor bit his tongue, pushing his adoration back, stuffing it angrily down to keep himself from vomiting up confession after confession. He wanted to pour his love over Michael's head, to drown him in his admiration and his desire. There was a hungry, dark place in Trevor's mind that constantly howled to be filled. It had howled as Trevor skated alone across the little frozen lake behind his mother's trailer as a little kid. It howled when she looked down on him, when she touched him with her long red fingernails. It screamed when Trevor had been handed his discharge papers by the Royal Canadian Airforce's medical examiner. And it had let loose a long keening moan as Trevor wandered aimlessly along the border with no purpose and no desire except to inflict pain on the unfortunates who crossed his path. It was only after that day on the airstrip where they had met that Trevor understood; the hole in his heart had always been, and would always be, exactly Michael-shaped.

Trevor shook. An indignant jolt passed through him as he realized what was happening, and he clenched his fists tight, his chin sinking down to settle on his chest. He stared up at Michael through a thick haze, barely holding himself together, obvious even in the dark, filthy room. He was quivering like a fucking little girl. _Trembling like a coward_. Like he shook when realized he had been abandoned at the mall all those years ago, _again_ , small and alone. His extremities felt suddenly like jelly, adrenaline coursing through him harder than he remembered experiencing from any recreational drug. (Though, to be fair, Trevor didn't remember much when he was on drugs.) If he didn't melt into the mattress on the spot, he would rip Michael's head off with the un-summoned rush of chemicals. It would be because he was trying to _fuck him too hard_ , but it would be an accident.

"...Mikey," The name rumbled out one last time, tremulous, too raw with want to not be a confession all by itself, as Trevor slid his leg up Michael's side, pulling him in closer with a yank of the knee. They stared at each other a moment, Michael's hand lingering on Trevor's thigh as they went somewhere else together besides the stinking shitstorm trailer where they would momentarily be fucking on shards of broken wood and a bare mattress soaked in violent splashes of cum and blood.

Trevor's fear piqued then, as he stared too long into Michael's eyes, and suddenly he rolled back out of the vulnerable position and turned to straddle the mattress on his knees. He felt Michael draw back to make space, but turned over his shoulder to grab his wrist and pull him back in. He gave Michael an impatient glare and slapped one of his ruddy asscheeks in a crass invitation. The grunt-cough Trevor cleared the air with once, twice, was the sound of business. He rolled his neck and shook out his long, sinewy arms to clear them of the jitters before going down on all fours.

"Before I'm 75, _Michael_." He barked.

  
*  


The sight of Trevor on all fours was more or less the last straw (that and the broom handle comment, from what dark provenance _that_ rush of blood had come from Michael did not want or need to know). He pushed his hands into Trevor's ass cheeks, gave them one indulgent knead before spreading them apart. With his left hand he took his dick and lined it against Trevor's dark, swollen hole. It was still too small—it had been so long since he'd had anal, was it supposed to still be this small?—and Trevor was wound fundamentally too tight for this even after an orgasm and a solid finger-fucking. But it was no use fighting the inevitable.

He wrapped his fingers around the front of Trevor's thigh and pulled him backward onto his cock, pushing in. It actually hurt it was so tight around his cock, and he thought he could feel the flesh rending around him. Both of their bodies shook with violent exertion as he push-pulled until he was all the way in, his balls flush against Trevor's. Michael stopped and panted, tried to breathe, tried to force Trevor to breathe through example but they were both far too busy cursing.

Of course it wasn't easy. It was never easy, what they had. It wasn't normal, natural or beautiful. Their fucking would never be explained in sex ed diagrams or canonical love stories. There was none of the easy, self-lubricated motion of cock in cunt that Michael was so used to. This _hurt_ , this was _hard_. This was against science and religion, this was wrapping their arms around one another, giving a finger to history and biology and hurtling head-first toward the much-deserved death of the species. This was for love of one another and pure fucking hatred for the rest of the world.

He realized that buried in the linguistic minefield of Trevor's expletives was the command to "MOVE, you fucking cow." Gingerly, Michael tilted his pelvis back, letting his cock slide partially back out of Trevor's ass. Trevor released a low, growling moan that traveled like electricity down Michael's spine. "You like that baby?" he said, half fueled by dirty talk reflexes, half by actual concern. "Do you want to feel that some more?" He watched for Trevor's response, saw only his head slung low between his shoulders, swaying slowly back and forth in what could have been yes, no, maybe.

Slowly he pushed in, slid out, tried to establish some kind of rhythm, but his hips were already stuttering. He dropped his forehead between Trevor's shoulder blades, inhaled his sweat and solidity in an attempt to ground himself. Trevor had always had the most crushingly gorgeous shoulders. Michael remembered running gloved hands over them once when Trevor was blowing him behind a bar, thinking even then through stubborn heterosexuality, god, what shoulders. They were so wide, so strong, so masculine. Michael had wanted to take his gloves off to touch him then, but they were interrupted by a bar fight that was taken outside. He wondered if he had, what would have happened then, if all of this would have been different.

The answer, of course, was no. This was exactly as it had to be.

He was getting lost again, in the past, in his head. He bit Trevor's back, hard, before raising himself back up, replanting his knees firmly behind Trevor's. He traced the indentations of his own teeth on Trevor's back and pushed his dick even farther inside, held it there, as thoughtless words of possessiveness tumbled out of his mouth.

"I want to keep fucking you, T. I want to fuck you on your back and against the wall and in my lap and on the floor. I want to go back to that parking lot and fuck you in the car, in front of the cops. I want to fuck you in front of your stupid friends, especially Roy, fuck that fucking Roy or whatever his name is, so they all know where it is that you and me stand. I want you to smell so much like my dick that no other men will come near you."

  
*  


" _DON'T_ talk about Ron right now, ARGH!" The demand exploded out of the Canadian like an airtight seal being punctured, leaving him feeling hopelessly winded. His whole body prickled with sweat and tension as he arched his back, shivering, his head hanging low to the mattress, wet clumps of his thin hair brushing against the solitary sheet.

Trevor's asshole hurt. It burned with a white heat as Michael's thick girth slowly penetrated a part of him he usually saved only for evacuation purposes. (Though more recently also the occasional novelty dildo thanks to good old Debra.) But even with a courtesy fingering, his whole body seized against the intrusion, forcing a tidal wave of obscenities to spill out from between Trevor's clenched teeth, only to be swallowed up by the mattress.

"Your cock is the size of a fucking freight train you degenerate porkchop!" The sweating pilot attempted to fist his partially soft dick a few times, before abandoning the concept for the present moment. "What the hell are you doing back there, Michael? Fuck me harder, I'm not made out of broken glass! Dépêchez-vous!"

Tight! Too tight. Everything was _too tight_. Trevor clenched himself around Michael, willing himself to loosen up. It was all a preposterous contradiction of actions and intentions... in other words, a Trevor Philips Original. It wasn't even that he had _never been fucked in the ass_ before. (Because that was a fucking laugh if anything was.) It was just that those first few times were a dark place from a long time ago, better not ruminated over as an adult, much less at a critical moment like this. But even during this momentous occasion, those memories came unbidden. Trevor angrily pushed them aside with an agitated shake of the head.

There had been _other_ encounters over the years. Remember those? THOSE ones were more worthy of a good comparison. Times which had been (debatably) more consensual. Trevor had needed to spend his time in prison doing SOMETHING, after all, besides beating the shit out of people and wiping his boogers on the cafeteria wall. And the first few years after Michael's quote unquote "death"? That had been a dark time too, though for different reasons. Fucking and getting fucked had tangled hopelessly up with the first of Trevor's famous blackouts, mingling synonymously with violence and death. Men, women, cops, hitchhikers, meth heads, prostitutes... it was all the same fucking thing when Michael Townley had ceased to exist in the world.

Trevor took the sharp painful burn with gritted teeth, his neck filling with tension, until he was bracing himself with his forehead and his fists against the grimy bed, pushing back against Michael's dick with a ferocious disregard. Michael's heavy hands ran hot tracks across his body, wrenching him back to be slowly impaled on his chubby coke can of an erection. The hands ran over the bite marks on Trevor's shoulder blade, reminding Trevor of the startled snarl the teeth had originally elicited. He tried to breath, forcing the thick air through his clenched jaw like water through a grate. Michael's low voice poured filthy jumbled words over Trevor's back, cajoling him, pooling down his spine. He bristled.

" _Pourquoi n'avez-vous pas me baises quand nous étions enfants?_ " The words came unbidden in reply, even unrealized, as Michael slowly felt out an established rhythm, pulling out of Trevor with it a low, gravely moan.

He hung his head, leaning back and beginning to ease into the feeling. The way Trevor's body was locked, the hammering pace of his heart, the sweat dripping in fine rivulets down his neck, back, arms, thighs... Trevor could blame it on his past, on hands other than Michael's that had caressed and prodded in all the same ways. But one overriding fact trumped every other circumstance with a deafening glory. It _wasn't_ someone else. It was _Michael Townley_ who was fucking him. _Michael_ who had been dead and buried in a hole full of icy mud for nine long suffering years. _Michael_ , who despite an endless list of character flaws along with both minute and major betrayals, was still very much fucking alive. His stink, his hands, his voice, his hair, his cock... Michael.

He was a much-loved memory. He was sacred. He was the taste of icy wind blowing over an empty field. Home.

Townley's cock sunk in to the base, filling Trevor up uncomfortably full, and his body buckled under the sensation. Another long groan sloughed out of him and he sunk his forehead back into the bed again, wracking his hands up over his neck, slashing crazed fingers through his hair. The boundaries of his identity rattled ominously. The next thrust brought on another moan, though this one held a singularly distinct tone of despair.

" _J'ai été en amour avec vous toute ma vie! Menteur! Vous m'avez trahi!_ " The thick french words were slurred with lust and betrayal, reflecting Trevor's diminishing mental presence.

_Michael Townley sitting in his parked car outside Trevor's Trailer. Michael Townley grinning next to Brad with a pint in his fist. Michael Townley's face blood-flecked and full of life. Michael's kind eyes as he settled a calming hand on Trevor's shoulder._

"... _Fuck_... _Michael_..." The pilot balled his fists in the sheets, rocking back against Michael in a hungry arc, before twisting over a shoulder to wrack his hollow gaze over the other man. Even in the dark, Michael was a glorious silhouette. The shadow of a mountain. Trevor's face was unhinged, lost somewhere between lust and pain. His french admonitions continued in English, uncaring of the gaps in Michael's perceptions.

"...Michael... _hmmmnnnn_ , _Mikey_... back then... I would have...followed you _anywhere_... Don't-" he struggled with the accolade, swallowing, then turned away without finishing. He had already gone too far. Breaking his cardinal rule, even in French, was _un-fucking-acceptable._

  
*  


The sound of Trevor slurring into French was enough to make Michael's vision go white. He let out a groan that was more animal than human and redoubled his efforts to fuck Trevor in half. His hands planted firmly on Trevor's hips, he looped one foot under Trevor's ankle to pull his body closer, to get more contact as Trevor urged him on (he assumed, most selfishly) in the most unintelligibly erotic language ever fucking invented.

There was trouble in Trevor's voice, however, that Michael could just barely perceive through the language barrier and the haze of lust and grime. A thin thread of hysteria was woven through his words, like Trevor was on the edge of something other than a mind-blowing orgasm. Michael could feel he was losing him here, somehow—to what, he didn't know. Memories, he guessed, of himself or worse, some other monster hiding in the closet of Trevor's brain. He got the sudden feeling that if he didn't ground him somehow he would become untethered and float away, abandoning Michael in the moment that was supposed to be consummation of their most unholy fucking union. If he kept fucking him like this, chasing his own pleasure, pretty soon it would be no different from fucking a corpse.

Michael pulled his cock out of Trevor's ass, and with quick, firm hands guided him onto his back. He saw with dismay that Trevor's cock was flaccid. That would make sense, if Trevor was literally any other human male, but Michael knew from experience ( _too little experience_ , god what a disaster) that Trevor's entire body was a sexual organ, and as long as there was blood in his veins Trevor should be at least a little hard. He wasn't going to argue the point, though. As much as it was a blow to his masculine pride that Trevor wasn't automatically hard through the sheer aura of his own dick, he was too selfish and too close to his own release to spend too much time worrying about it.

He lined up their hips and pushed his cock back into Trevor's ass, hilting himself, and lowered his body flush against Trevor's. Yeah, this was much better. He pressed his face into Trevor's neck and wrapped gorilla arms around him, holding him in place, their chests aligned. Then he began to move his hips again, grinding in deep against a place in Trevor he'd never touched before.

"I won't," he said, picking up the only thread of conversation he'd been able to understand, muttering into Trevor's neck, unsure of what he was promising but blindly, impossibly sure that it was one he would keep. He pressed the hook of his nose up under Trevor's jaw, kissed him there, fucked him deeper, felt himself unraveling.

"I won't, baby, I won't, I won't."

  
*  


The words _'I won't!_ ' reverberated through Trevor's skull, clearing some of his black thoughts out like a chill wind. The mantra pulled him back into himself, away from the edge of the dark precipice. They were somehow more placating than the sweating weight of Michael's body above him, now grinding Trevor into the mattress with the purposeful, fevered force of someone close to cumming. The words held conviction, as if Michael believed himself implicitly, as if he wanted to please his best friend for once, despite not knowing exactly what it was that he was agreeing to. Maybe it was the heat of the moment, but it's purpose wasn't important. It was the tone, pacifying in it's sincere corniness, like a love confession from an old black and white drama. It was cheesy. No, it was worse than that... it was fucking stupid. But it was Michael Townley to the T, so Trevor took it without question. It helped that at the moment he was struggling with words in general, but that skill would return with time. Accepting loving reassurances (plus a hard, fat cock) from Michael Townley was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Don't leave again. Don't lie again. Don't. Don't. Words that didn't need to be said.

Michael's nose and mouth came up beneath his chin, nosing at his mustache, hot spit sucking the stubbly skin into raw red flesh. The next groan that cut from Trevor's chest burbled up half a laugh, raw and hoarse from the unexpected mental onslaught this encounter was bringing on, combined with Michael's weight pressing him down. His hands slid up to Michael's shoulders, then dragged down hard, scraping the nubs of his fingernails into hard muscle, leaving red welts. A chick move for a chick position. Not that it mattered... gender rolls were bullshit here, despite Mikey's testosterone-inflated sense of masculine ego shouting otherwise. The positions didn't matter. The parts didn't matter. It was the _commitment_ that was important. The _consummation_... the _outcome_ , _that_ was what mattered. And Michael was doing a bang-up job of jack hammering Trevor's asshole into oblivion so by all accounts the Canadian didn't care if he wanted to be the man, the woman, or the circus elephant with a bazooka. It was a good fuck. At least, it _seemed_ like it should be a good fuck... if Trevor could manage to discern something like that out of the shit storm of emotional and physical baggage that this was bringing on in a tornado onslaught. If Michael didn't run like a coward, Trevor would definitely be the one doing the fucking next time. So saying there would be a next time, which at this point was hearsay. Ridiculous, unlikely, fantasy hearsay.

Trevor tried to push away his memories of the past, reaching down to grab his calf just below the knee and pull his leg up flush against Michael's ribcage, opening his body up wider. Michael violated the opportunity and thrust harder, jarring Trevor's teeth even as his dick finally worked deep enough inside to touch the magic button. Trevor actually felt his own dick lurch forward as it laid sandwiched between them, and he let out a startled grunt. His body was finally easing enough to reach his prostate, and thank the trash god of gay fucking because if the look on Michael's face was any indicator, their interlude was about to reach a fever- pitch. Trevor was about to bark an order to _"Why don't you jerk me off, you fat betraying slob!_?" but found his tongue was still too-thick in his mouth after his unintelligent french foray into thinly veiled confessions of love. He pushed the anxiety out and slung his elbow around the back of Michael's neck instead, pushing up with his shoulder until Michael was forced to pull their chests apart and push his weight up on his thick arms. Trevor grabbed his hardening cock and jerked it with matching purpose in synch with the thrusts.

" _Don't-_ " Trevor sputtered with some difficulty as his prostate was struck directly. He appeared to be preparing to finish his earlier sentiment, but a third strike wiped the serious look away in a bristle of goosebumps. It was replaced in a matter of seconds with murderous intent. "DON'T you _fucking_ come yet...you... _useless old man_."

  
*  


Michael gazed stupidly down at Trevor before his face cracked into a gleeful, evil smile. There was Trevor—mass murderer, meth impresario, haunter of every biker's dreams from here to Chumash—impaled on his (Michael Townley's—HIS—) cock and fighting to spread himself wider, let Michael in deeper. Jerking his own reinvigorated dick like a chimp on crystal. He could sling all the death threats he wanted but nothing would take this image away from him—nothing would remove the glaze over his eyes when Michael pushed all the way in, the stutter, the blush. Trevor was fighting valiantly to retain frightfulness but Michael was buried balls-deep in his man pussy and oh, oh god—

"I'm gonna—fuck, T, I'm gonna," Michael gasped, and in a last desperate maneuver tipped his weight up and forward, folding Trevor further on himself so that Michael's short, thick cock could rub deeper still in Trevor's hole. Michael slammed his hips into him, the wet staccato of his balls slapping Trevor's ass filling the wretched trailer.

"FUCK, FUCK," he shouted, and suddenly he was cumming fast and hard into Trevor's ass. He was cumming for a good fifteen seconds, continuing to thrust and grunt and curse his way through it, determined to keep fucking Trevor and prolong this feeling for as long as his body would let him. He was dimly aware of Trevor's own release coming in thick white ropes over his stomach, his neck, even a little on the side of his face, and his body shuddered in sympathy.

Finally, his cum spent, his forearms and legs trembling from the exertion of keeping his weight held at that perfect, precarious angle, he slid out of Trevor's wet hole with a satisfying squelch and flopped bonelessly to the bed beside him. He was already fighting to stay awake, his vision dimming as his eyelids began closing with the inevitability of a thrown rock returning to earth. He raked his eyes over Trevor's face, looking for something, what he didn't know. Trevor's eye was swollen shut now, and he could see the skin discoloration even in the dark of the trailer (though, wasn't it lighter in here now? was dawn already coming?). He wanted to apologize again, for everything. For this night but mostly for before. For leaving him, for lying, for not _doing this before_ , over and over and over again. For never admitting to Trevor, himself, God the Devil or Amanda what it was Trevor really meant to him. He meant to say all this and something more, but what came out was—

"There's cum in your mustache," and he began to snore.


End file.
